Laid-Off MindsEye Staff Watch Fans Flown In on Company Dime as IWGB Takes to the Streets
Key takeaways
- IWGB union members protested outside Build a Rocket Boy's Scottish offices on July 11th over an allegedly expenses-paid fan playtest following 250–300 layoffs
- Former employee Isaac Hudd accused co-CEOs Mark Gerhard and Leslie Benzies of letting the French studio branch go bankrupt and replacing redundant staff with Discord fans
- BARB is separately accused of installing surveillance software on staff PCs to identify alleged internal saboteurs, compounding an already serious labor dispute
On Saturday, July 11th, members of the IWGB union gathered outside Build a Rocket Boy's offices in Scotland to protest what they describe as a tone-deaf decision by studio leadership. The demonstration came after the company — best known for the troubled release of MindsEye — reportedly flew fans in, with travel costs covered, to participate in a playtest event for the game. This came on the heels of between 250 and 300 layoffs across the studio over the past 13 months, a figure that paints a stark picture of the company's recent instability.
IWGB chair Spring McParlin-Jones issued a forceful statement condemning the event, calling it 'a waste of money, and a kick in the teeth for the fired workers who are seeing fans brought in to do jobs that would otherwise have been theirs.' The specific detail that rankles most with the union is that BARB reportedly covered travel expenses for attendees — a cost that ex-employees argue is especially galling given the scale of recent redundancies. The fact that MindsEye is an online game, McParlin-Jones and others have noted, means the playtest could have been conducted remotely at virtually no cost.
Former BARB employee Isaac Hudd delivered a speech at the protest that laid out a broader indictment of the studio's co-CEOs, Mark Gerhard and Leslie Benzies. Hudd accused the pair of allowing BARB's French operation to collapse into bankruptcy while expecting local government to absorb the fallout, and alleged that redundant community managers were replaced with fans recruited directly from the game's Discord server. His remarks painted a picture of leadership that has repeatedly prioritized optics and internal power struggles over the welfare of its workforce.
The situation at Build a Rocket Boy has been deteriorating in very public fashion since MindsEye launched last June. Beyond the layoffs, Gerhard has made headlines for claiming the game was actively sabotaged by employees, going so far as to allege he embedded evidence of that sabotage into a Hitman-inspired mission called Blacklisted that was added to the game earlier this year. The IWGB has separately accused BARB management of illegally installing surveillance software on staff computers as part of an effort to identify supposed internal saboteurs.
LagPing reached out to Build a Rocket Boy for comment but had not received a response at the time of publication. The protest was first highlighted by People Make Games journalist Chris Bratt, whose ongoing coverage of conditions at BARB has helped bring wider attention to the situation. With the union now taking direct action outside the studio's doors, pressure on leadership appears to be mounting — and the community watching closely from both inside and outside the industry.
The bigger picture
The scene outside Build a Rocket Boy's offices on Saturday is almost a microcosm of everything that has gone wrong in the games industry's relationship with its workers over the past few years. Studios greenlight expensive, morale-destroying decisions — in this case, funding fan travel for a playtest — while simultaneously cutting hundreds of jobs and resisting accountability at every turn. Whether or not the playtest itself has legitimate development value, the optics of spending company money on fan hospitality while former employees are still navigating redundancy proceedings is extraordinarily poor judgment.
What makes the BARB situation particularly significant for the industry to watch is the surveillance angle. Allegations that management installed monitoring software on worker machines to hunt for 'saboteurs' — if proven — would represent a serious legal and ethical breach. That narrative, combined with the bankruptcy of the French studio arm and the now-public protests, suggests a company culture that has become deeply adversarial toward its own employees. This is not just a PR problem; it signals structural dysfunction that no playtest event, however well-intentioned, can paper over.
For the broader games labor movement, BARB is fast becoming a test case. The IWGB's willingness to take to the streets — rather than quietly filing grievances — reflects a growing confidence among game worker unions to escalate publicly when internal channels fail. Readers should watch whether Build a Rocket Boy responds substantively to these allegations, whether any regulatory bodies take interest in the surveillance claims, and whether MindsEye's development can stabilize amid what amounts to a full-blown institutional crisis. The answers will say a great deal about where power actually sits in the modern games industry.
We've been tracking the slow-motion unraveling at Build a Rocket Boy for a while now, and Saturday's protest felt like a moment that demanded proper coverage rather than a passing mention. The combination of mass layoffs, surveillance allegations, and now a funded fan playtest event lands in a very specific place — it's the kind of story that touches on labor rights, corporate accountability, and the human cost of troubled game development all at once. We think our readers, many of whom work in tech and gaming themselves, have a direct stake in understanding how studios treat their workers when things go wrong. This isn't just drama for the sake of it; it's a story with real implications for how the industry organizes and who gets protected. We'll continue following developments at BARB closely, and we'd encourage anyone with firsthand knowledge of the situation to reach out.
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