The Rockstar tribunal: what a Glasgow courtroom has revealed about GTA 6
Rockstar dismissed 34 staff across its UK and Canadian studios on 30 October 2025. Thirty-one of them are now in front of an employment tribunal in Glasgow that runs until mid-October, and Rockstar's own filings have become the first place the studio has ever referred to a GTA VI online format.
The most detailed statements Rockstar has ever made about Grand Theft Auto VI's development are not on the Newswire. They are in a bundle of legal documents filed with an employment tribunal in Glasgow. The final hearing in the case brought by 31 former Rockstar staff opened on 10 September 2026 and is listed to run until mid-October — roughly a month before the game they worked on goes on sale.
This is not a games story that happens to involve a court. It is a court case that has become a source, because to defend the dismissals Rockstar has had to describe what the dismissed people said, and what they said was about GTA VI. In doing so the studio put in writing something it had never published anywhere: a reference to an online 32-player format.
Where the case stands
| Status | |
|---|---|
| Dismissals on 30 October 2025, across the UK and Canadian studios | Confirmed |
| Number dismissed | 34 across both countries; 31 at the UK studio are the claimants in Glasgow |
| Venue and dates | Glasgow Tribunals Centre, opened 10 September 2026, listed to mid-October |
| Claims being heard | Unfair dismissal, trade-union victimisation and blacklisting |
| Rockstar's case | Gross misconduct — confidential information shared in a public forum |
| The union's case | The dismissals targeted organisers of a new IWGB branch |
| An interim-relief order requiring Rockstar to keep paying the claimants | Refused, 13 January 2026 |
| A judgment | Not yet issued |
Published totals differ because they count different things: 34 is the number dismissed across the UK and Canada, 31 the number of claimants at the UK studio whose cases are before the Glasgow tribunal. Both figures appear in reputable reporting and neither is a correction of the other.
How it got here
| Date | What happened |
|---|---|
| Before October 2025 | Staff at the UK studio organise a branch of the Independent Workers' Union of Great Britain |
| 30 October 2025 | 34 people are dismissed across the UK and Canadian studios, without notice |
| Days later | The IWGB calls it "the most blatant and ruthless act of union busting in the history of the games industry" |
| 13 January 2026 | Employment Judge Frances Eccles refuses interim relief after a two-day hearing |
| Later in 2026 | The tribunal rules the workers may bring all of their allegations, blacklisting included, to a full hearing |
| 10 September 2026 | The final hearing opens, with a rally outside the Glasgow Tribunals Centre |
The January ruling is the one most often quoted out of context. Interim relief is an order that an employer keep paying a claimant while the case runs, and the test for it is whether the tribunal thinks the claimant is likely to win at trial. Judge Eccles found that "the tribunal was unable to conclude that it appears likely that the tribunal will find that the principal reason for the claimants' dismissal was their membership of the IWGB" — a refusal to prejudge, not a finding on the merits. The union's response was that the decision "does nothing to suggest that Rockstar will not be found guilty of unfair dismissal when the case goes to trial". Rockstar's was that it regretted "that we were put in a position where dismissals were necessary".
The 32-player line, and exactly what it says
The sentence that matters to anyone reading this for the game rather than the case appears in Rockstar's own written argument. Describing what the dismissed staff had been discussing in a channel of the union's Discord server, it says:
Other Claimants in Room C were candidly referencing game features – one of the most closely guarded secrets of the company. Two discussed an online 32 player format which was highly confidential at that time.
Read it carefully, because a great deal of coverage has not. The filing establishes three things and no more:
- Rockstar itself has now referred to an online format for GTA VI. Until this document, every statement on the subject came from Take-Two, and none of them used the word "online" about VI at all.
- A 32-player figure existed internally at some point before October 2025, and was confidential enough that discussing it was, in the company's view, gross misconduct.
- Rockstar's description of the leaked material is "game features", which is a concession that what the dismissed staff discussed was real. The studio's case depends on the information being genuine; that is what makes sharing it misconduct.
What it does not establish is the one thing the headlines claim. It is not an announcement, it does not say the figure is final, and it does not say the format shipped, survived, or still exists. Internal numbers move. A 32-player lobby size discussed in 2025 is evidence that an online mode was being built; it is not a specification of the mode you might one day play. Rockstar has still announced no mode, no name, no date and no price, and everything in our GTA VI online explainer about the absence of an announcement remains true.
A player count also says nothing about what those players would do or where they would do it. Both previous Rockstar online modes ran on their parent game's world, so an online Leonida would inherit the map the story is built on — which is inference from two examples, exactly as it was before this filing.
What Rockstar told the tribunal about keeping the game secret
The same hearing produced the fullest account yet of the secrecy regime around GTA VI, because Rockstar's defence rests on it: if the information was extraordinarily sensitive, dismissal was a proportionate response.
The studio compared its position to other companies' trade secrets, arguing that "guarding the secrets of the unique gameplay and design are akin to Apple protecting the iPhone or Coke protecting its formula", and that "the standards and expectations regarding information security and privacy are exponentially beyond that of most employers". It told the tribunal it had coated its office windows with privacy film after aerial drones were used to photograph the inside of the building.
That is worth setting beside what has actually leaked. The September 2022 breach put 90 clips of an early build online, and the 2026 leak and the hunt for its source have kept Take-Two filing subpoenas through the summer. The drones and the window film are the part of that story nobody outside the building had heard.
What each side is arguing
Rockstar's position has not changed since the week of the dismissals: "Individuals across the UK and Canada were dismissed for gross misconduct following the sharing of confidential company information, not because of alleged trade union membership or activity. We reject the claims and will defend them vigorously before the tribunal." In the hearing the studio has framed the Discord messages as leaks of "upcoming and unannounced" games in a public forum.
The claimants' opening submissions describe the same day as a calculated "decimation" of the workforce, aimed at the organisers of the new branch in order to destabilise it. Their case is that the Discord was a private union channel, that no disciplinary process or right of appeal was offered, and that the company's choice of who to dismiss maps onto union activity rather than onto who said what. They are asking for reinstatement, failing that compensation, and a finding that the dismissals were unfair.
Where the burden sits matters. In a full unfair-dismissal hearing it falls on the employer to show the real reason for the dismissals, so it is Rockstar that has to prove misconduct rather than the claimants who have to prove victimisation. That is a large part of why the case has produced so much documentary detail about GTA VI: the defence requires it.
What the dismissed staff are asking of players
They are not asking for a boycott, and they have said so on the record. A video published by the IWGB features three of the dismissed developers making the opposite request: "Don't boycott GTA 6. Win justice for the people who helped make it." Their argument is that they spent years "pouring our hard work, skill, and creativity into making GTA", and that the game selling well is not in tension with their case. The support they have asked for is money for the legal fund, through union merchandise, rather than a withheld purchase.
It is an unusually specific request and worth repeating accurately, because "fired developers" and "boycott" tend to be assumed to go together. Here they do not.
What is not confirmed
- The outcome. No judgment has been issued, and a tribunal that finishes in mid-October may reserve its decision for weeks or months afterwards. Anyone telling you how this ends is guessing.
- That GTA VI will have a 32-player online mode. The figure appears in a description of a 2025 conversation, in a document arguing that the conversation should not have happened. It is not a specification and Rockstar has not repeated it.
- That an online mode exists at all in shipping form. Still unannounced, still undated, still unnamed — see the online explainer for the full state of the record.
- Any link between the case and the release schedule. The second delay was announced six days after the dismissals. Neither side has connected them, and nobody has claimed causation. The chronology is real; the inference is nobody's.
- What was in the rest of the Discord. Only the fragments each side has chosen to quote are public. The full evidence bundle is not.
- Whether any dismissed worker returns. Reinstatement is being sought. It is rarely ordered.
What happens next
The hearing is listed to finish in mid-October, which puts the end of evidence about five weeks before 19 November. A tribunal judgment could land in the same fortnight as the game, well after it, or between the two. Take-Two's next quarterly results, historically in the first half of November, are the other date on which the company can be asked about any of this in public.
Neither Rockstar nor Take-Two has published anything about the case on the Newswire or in an investor statement beyond the standard denial, and nothing in the schedule suggests that will change. For now the record is the filings, and the filings have already said more about GTA VI than the marketing has.
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