MindsEye developers Build A Rocket Boy have reportedly initiated a redundancy process that could result in cuts affecting over 100 people.
This would follow the game’s dire launch, which was plagued by bugs and performance issues, contributing to a largely negative critical and player reception.
According to a report from IGN, staff have been notified the 45 day consultation period required by UK law when companies plan to enact 100 or more redundancies has begun today, June 23.
There’s no concrete word as of yet as to exactly how many of Build A Rocket Boy’s around 300 person UK workforce may be affected by the cuts, or whether any of the around 200 staff it has based abroad could also be at risk of being let go. IGN cites BARB co-CEO Mark Gerhard as insisting in an email to staff that the studio is still committed to working on MindsEye, and alluding to the switch in intensity between pre and post-launch development.
We’ve reached out to Build A Rocket Boy for comment.
If redundancies come to pass, this would be the second time the studio behind MindsEye has cut jobs this year. That February round of layoffs, affecting a still unspecified number of staff, came not long after BARB secured $110 million in private investment towards creating MindsEye, the metaversey platform called Everywhere that the game was initially supposed to launch as part of, and the Arcadia UGC tools that ended up becoming MindsEye’s mission building/sharing bits.
MindsEye launched on June 10, and Build A Rocket Boy have been quick to start releasing emergency patches to try and take care of its various bugs and issues, as well as attempting to improve how it runs on PC.
