Rockstar and the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain have set out their arguments at an ongoing employment tribunal expected to run until October 16.
The GTA developer sacked 34 Rockstar staff last year, citing gross misconduct and a leak of confidential information. The claimants, however, claim they were dismissed because of their union activities.
According to legal filings obtained by Game Developer, the claimants allege Rockstar had a mole inside the union’s Discord server from as early as February 2024, feeding information back to HR manager and co-studio operations director, Charlie Kinloch.
They allege that the mole flagged a sharp rise in union recruitment in October 2025, shortly before membership crossed the 10% threshold needed for UK statutory recognition. The firings came weeks later.
The claimants insist that they were dismissed with no advance warning and escorted from the building without specific allegations. They say union server membership dropped sharply in the days that followed.
Rockstar disputes this account, however, claiming that it has had to become increasingly protective of confidential information given past leaks that saw unfinished GTA 6 development footage posted online.
The company argues that its games’ design needs to be as protected as any closely guarded corporate formula, comparing its approach to Apple or Coca-Cola. It describes the union’s Discord server as three “rooms” of increasing size and openness, the largest of which had roughly 350 members by October 2025, most of whom were anonymous. Rockstar claims that within that space, the fired employees gave outsiders – including former employees, “competitors,” and a journalist – access to sensitive internal information.
The studio also points to hostile comments made about managers and the company within the server, and says the 34 dismissals came down to what it calls an “irretrievable breakdown in trust and confidence,” rather than union organizing, and stressed that three of those dismissed in Canada were not union members.
For the full history of the dispute, see our timeline of events.