Build A Rocket Boy, the Edinburgh studio founded by former Rockstar North president Leslie Benzies, has filed for administration and appears to be closing permanently, according to multiple reports from current and former staff. The company confirmed to GamesIndustry.biz that Opus Advisory Group has been appointed as administrator, a step that signals the studio cannot pay its debts and needs formal protection from creditors, as reported by PlayStation Universe.
The studio’s accounts for the twelve months ending September 2025 showed an operating loss of £47.5 million and net losses of £36.2 million, with £61.8 million owed to creditors, according to figures cited by PlayStation Universe. The BBC reported that the company’s most recent accounts listed net assets of £10.5 million against that same £36.2 million loss, underscoring how far the balance sheet had deteriorated, according to BBC News.
Several employees, including a level designer, a QA analyst, a release manager and a production QA analyst, said on LinkedIn over a recent 24-hour period that their time at the company had come to an end, according to Kotaku. One of the studio’s talent acquisition staff wrote that he would be helping the company through to its final days while wrapping up work in the human resources department, a detail Kotaku reported as evidence that this was not an ordinary round of layoffs at a company that intended to keep operating.
A launch that never recovered
MindsEye, released in June 2025 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S and PC, was Build A Rocket Boy’s first game and was widely criticised by reviewers and players for bugs and design problems, according to the BBC. Push Square reported that the poor state of the release led Sony to approve refunds on PlayStation 5 shortly after launch, and that despite subsequent patches, the game never gained the audience needed to turn its fortunes around, according to Push Square.
The BBC reported that between 250 and 300 staff were made redundant following the launch, and that former employees described the development process as chaotic, with senior managers accused of failing to listen to concerns raised during production, according to sources cited by the BBC. During an internal call after the layoffs, Benzies told staff that unspecified internal and external forces had worked to hinder the game’s release and said he intended to identify what he called saboteurs inside the company, as reported by the BBC, which noted the claim without independent verification of who those saboteurs might have been. In a statement given to the BBC, Build A Rocket Boy said that Benzies and the senior management team took full responsibility for the game’s troubled launch and acknowledged that the version released did not reflect the experience the studio’s community deserved.
KitGuru reported that the company’s later claims of sabotage and paid smear campaigns against the game were accusations for which little supporting evidence had been publicly presented, a caveat that outlet applied directly to statements made by studio leadership rather than treating those claims as established fact, according to KitGuru.
How the outlets framed it
Push Square and PlayStation Universe largely framed the closure as the predictable end of a project that was, in Push Square’s words, never good enough on a fundamental level to support a comeback story, treating the studio’s collapse mainly as a market failure. Kotaku and KitGuru took a more sceptical stance toward the studio’s own explanations, with KitGuru explicitly flagging that leadership’s claims of sabotage and smear campaigns lacked supporting evidence, while Kotaku emphasised the human toll through the words of departing employees themselves. The difference shows that trade coverage split between accepting the studio’s account of external forces working against it and questioning that account outright, leaving readers to weigh a business-failure narrative against one that treats leadership’s own explanations with more caution.
What comes next for the studio
Administration in the United Kingdom does not necessarily mean immediate closure. An appointed administrator is required to try to keep a business running, often with the aim of finding a buyer, while also working to recover as much money as possible for creditors, according to the BBC. If no buyer emerges and the company has no further way of raising cash, the process can end in liquidation. Kotaku reported that sources familiar with the situation had confirmed the studio is permanently closing its doors, though Build A Rocket Boy had not issued a formal statement confirming a full shutdown as of the most recent reporting.
