Build a Rocket Boy’s awaited debut, MindsEye has sputtered out the gate to sit comfortably among the most egregious commercial and critical disasters of 2025. But the story behind this collapse is more than a failure in the game of sports, it’s a textbook case in gross failures of leadership. This account is based on deep reporting and analysis of public statements and industry reports, as well as the direct testimony of those involved. We’ve invested a lot of time at our publication into the corporate side of the video game industry; the person writing this has spent over a decade doing post-mortems of studio and project management.
Long before MindsEye was even ready to hit store shelves, the warning signs for Build a Rocket Boy were clear to see. Early previews were bad, the launch trailer was underwhelming, and there’s no way of saying this nicely: an area-high unconvincing silence filled the gap between reveal and release, which was odd given the pedigree of founder and former Grand Theft Auto producer Leslie Benzies. A month before its release, it got even worse, with two chief executives leaving the company just two weeks before the game launch, and physical copies leaking early, which showed a game filled with game-breaking bugs and no gameplay. The issues were so severe that despite a promised day-one patch, the studio issued a public apology and PlayStation offered refunds.
Despite Leslie Benzies pointing to “internal and external saboteurs,” the actual source of the issue — described in a scathing open letter — lies firmly at the feet of leadership. The open letter, which was signed by 93 current and former developers at Build a Rocket Boy (and supported by the Game Workers Branch of the IWGB union), placed the responsibility for these problems solely on the studio’s executives. It references a culture that ignored seasoned personnel resulting in disastrous leadership failures in vision and project management.
The open letter painstakingly details the net leadership failures that broke the project and the studio. Such leadership failures, as documented, include a “lack of transparency and communication” cascading from the top. What is worse, developers suffered “barely tolerable rates of overtime,” the well-known sign of a production that has failed in planning and leadership. It also blasts what the letter terms “the disastrous handling of redundancies” in the months after the game’s launch — an event that the letter claims led to the loss of the majority of the UK staff from its 250 to 300 personnel post. The serial failures of leadership incubated an atmosphere of “burnout, job insecurity, [and] health risks.
The developers have laid out four specific demands from Mark Gerhard and Leslie Benzies in the wake of these leadership failures. They have demanded a public apology, appropriate compensation for the employees laid off, appropriate notice periods for the remaining personnel, a record of efforts made to ameliorate company conditions including union recognition, and a promise to utilize outside partners in the event of further job cuts. These demands are resulting from the cycle of leadership failure that repeated itself throughout the MindsEye development cycle.
The developers wrapped up their letter by challenging execs who habitually call employees “family” by saying “is this really how you treat your own?” And this heartbreaking question drives home the ultimate price of these leadership failures. Build a Rocket Boy was once a studio that raised $110m on the promise of a GTA-sized game, now it’s a cautionary tale. Decimating a talented workforce in the process, all those leadership failures led to one of the worst game launches of the decade. Blizzard’s future is certainly in rough shape without a real change in course — one that requires these fundamental leadership failures to be acknowledged and addressed.
