The publishing divorce everyone saw coming is now official. IO Interactive confirmed on Monday that its IOI Partners label has transferred all publishing rights for MindsEye back to developer Build a Rocket Boy, effective March 16. Build a Rocket Boy now holds sole publishing responsibilities for the game going forward. And as a direct consequence, the Hitman crossover mission that was announced in June 2025 has been cancelled.
The joint statement from both parties is about as warm as you'd expect from two companies quietly untangling a business relationship that didn't go well for either of them. "Both IOI Partners and Build A Rocket Boy recognize the anticipation this collaboration generated among the community and express their appreciation for the support shown by the players," it reads. Credit where it's due, at least they acknowledged the crossover had genuine fan interest before pulling the plug on it. That Hitman mission had people genuinely curious, and now it's gone without so much as a screenshot.
MindsEye launched on June 10, 2025 for PS5, Xbox Series, and PC, and the reception was brutal. Its Metacritic score sits at 38 on PC and 28 on PS5, making it the lowest-rated game of 2025 by a significant margin. OpenCritic tells a similar story. PlayStation, a platform that almost never does this, began issuing refunds to players over the performance issues and bugs at launch. That's not a rough launch. That's a collapse.
This was IOI Partners' first publishing deal, which makes the whole thing sting more for IO Interactive. The studio bought itself out from Square Enix in 2017 and built one of the most respected franchises in the genre with Hitman. Attaching that brand to MindsEye, even loosely via a crossover, was a risk that clearly didn't pay off. IO Interactive's CEO had already signalled the company might be done publishing other studios' games after this. That statement looks a lot more definitive now.
The Wreckage at Build a Rocket Boy
For Build a Rocket Boy, the situation is grimmer. The studio was founded by Leslie Benzies, former president of Rockstar North, which meant expectations were sky-high before a single frame of gameplay was shown. What shipped was widely described as a buggy, lifeless action game that couldn't justify its ambitions. The studio has since gone through multiple rounds of layoffs, with around 300 staff cut last year alone. Earlier this month, CEO Mark Gerhard announced further redundancies, describing the decision as "deeply painful."
Gerhard has also claimed that MindsEye's failure was partly the result of "organised espionage and corporate sabotage" by a third party, stating the studio now has "overwhelming evidence" and that the matter is moving toward prosecution. Make no mistake, that's an extraordinary claim, and without public evidence it's impossible to evaluate. What is publicly documented is the Steam page reviews, the refund situation, and the PlayStation Store listing for a game that never found its footing. Former staff have separately accused Benzies and Gerhard of micromanagement, enforced crunch, and mishandling the redundancy process. The espionage narrative hasn't changed any of that on the record.
Build a Rocket Boy says it plans to work with other partners on future projects, which suggests they're not shutting the lights off entirely. Whether there's a meaningful audience left for MindsEye after everything that's happened is a different question. IO Interactive, for its part, still has the World of Assassination to fall back on. The real damage here is to IOI Partners as a concept. Their first bet lost badly, and the crossover content that might have generated some goodwill between two fanbases never made it out the door.
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