In October 2025, GTA 6 developers Rockstar fired a group of 34 employees, most of them based in the United Kingdom, for “gross misconduct”, alleging that they had risked the leak of confidential information by posting on a Discord server set up by union organizers. The sacked British workers and their representatives have since taken Rockstar to court, accusing the company of getting rid of them to prevent their union from gaining enough members to gain official recognition under British law.
This week, both parties filed preliminary submissions to an employment tribunal in Glasgow, which Rockstar’s parent company Take-Two Interactive emailed to RPS and Game developeramong others. Together, the documents filed represent more than 100 pages of claims and counterclaims, with thousands of pages of evidence that will be discussed in the coming weeks. Among other things, the documents give us a better idea of the events that led to the firings, including the revelation that Rockstar had a mole or “whistleblower” feeding them information about people using the Discord server.
According to the fired workers’ court filing, Rockstar employees affiliated with the IWGB Game Workers union created what would become the Rockstar Game Workers Union Discord server in 2022. Before that, the lawyers say, there was “no official workplace channel through which concerns could be discussed independent of management.” At the time of the October 2025 layoffs, the server had approximately 340 members.
Rockstar management did not have direct access to the server until October 2025, but the former workers and their legal team claim that “since at least February 2024, (Rockstar HR director) Charlie Kinloch had received information from a junior employee about union activity within the server.” They claim that “over 21 months, at least 26 meetings or communications took place between Mr. Kinloch and (the junior employee) regarding the server, approximately half of which were initiated by Mr. Kinloch himself.”
The “mole” allegedly “provided screenshots and recordings, reported union meetings, training sessions and union member numbers, and identified union activists.” On October 7, 2025, they reportedly informed Kinlock that the union was 12 members short of the legal threshold for recognition, or 10% of the workforce. The union finally reached this milestone on October 18, with Kinloch informed on October 20, the fired workers say. At some point during this period, they continue, Rockstar management obtained the server credentials, and Rockstar’s vice president of information security, Abid Ansari, eventually logged in to download “announcement and general channel content.” Rockstar began laying off Discord members at the end of the month.
Rockstar’s own submission to the court partly fits this. The company’s lawyers cite three “whistleblowers” on Discord who reported security issues, including one member who had been leaking information to Rockstar management “for over two and a half years.” Rockstar’s lawyers claim that between October 13 and 16, a server member provided login information to Rockstar bosses; Before that, they claim, Rockstar was “largely in the dark” about events happening on the server, except for “occasional glimpses” of the care of their main “whistleblower.”
Documents filed with the court offer sharply contrasting views on the security of the Union Discord server itself. The union workers claim the server was “invitation only, restricted access, and subject to verification through Rockstar’s internal Slack platform,” explaining that people with an invite link were placed in a waiting room until they were approved by mods, who could verify them using Rockstar’s own Slack channels before granting “substantial access.” They emphasize that “no confidential information has been leaked from the server into the public domain.”
Rockstar, however, claims that “information on Discord was vulnerable in numerous ways, including through deliberate leaking by a disgruntled Discord user, through loss or theft of Discord users’ personal devices, through successful phishing or social engineering by one of Discord’s users, or through hacking of Discord itself.” » Among other things, they support this by claiming that someone actually leaked information from the Discord: the aforementioned “whistleblower.”
Rockstar offers a layman’s description of the structure of the Discord server in its filing, describing it as essentially consisting of three “rooms”: one for members of the IWGB union committee only, or members of specific working groups, which Rockstar could not access at all until a court-ordered disclosure on August 3; a second for general members of the IWGB, which Rockstar could not initially access either; and a third “room” made up of nearly 350 people, some of whom were anonymous, while others identified themselves as Rockstar employees.
Rockstar claims that “26 people, according to an initial analysis”, in the third “room” were not actually employees, while 10 others were former employees, including a few who had “left in a bad position in the company and were therefore well motivated to harm it”. The fired workers acknowledge that the “former employees” were members of Discord, but claim they were confined to certain channels and not present in the General and Announcements channels that Rockstar initially had direct access to. Rockstar also repeated an earlier accusation that one of the members of the wider Discord group was a working journalist.
As for the incriminating information circulating, Rockstar claims it ranged from discussions about digital and real-world security measures, through internal correspondence such as HR emails, to “well-kept secrets” about game projects, including a “32-player online format” for a “highly confidential” project. They also claim that Discord users have shared “a lot of information” regarding the development of GTA 6, including discussions about delays, overtime, and difficulties.
The former workers, meanwhile, claim that “no messages revealed the date GTA VI would be released, the date of any trailers, or comparable confidential information,” and that “the messages generally discussed workplace policies that were central to union organizing.” They comment that many posts about office activities deemed “egregious” by Rockstar were “insignificant in terms of discipline but…legitimate as matters of concern to a union representing its members.”
Both documents have an entire section on the other side’s use of foul language, with Rockstar’s lawyers accusing Discord union members of “openly and vituperatively disparaging and defaming” the company’s management, while the former workers point out that “profanity was routinely used by (Rockstar) management and staff without disciplinary consequences.” According to the former workers, one employee was told after joining Rockstar “that the use of the word ‘pussy’ was an ‘apparently acceptable use of language in Scotland’ and was used regularly by management”.
Lawyers for laid-off workers say the abrupt dismissal of 34 employees had “an immediate chilling effect” on the Discord server. Membership numbers apparently fell “from approximately 390 to 261 in a matter of days, with 136 people leaving and only nine new memberships”, while “11 Rockstar employees canceled their IWGB memberships the following week”. They broadly assert that Rockstar “identified and terminated members and activists of a rapidly growing union, including many of those central to its organizing structures, in an effort to disable the organization as a whole and deter others, and, in particular, to prevent the union from winning the right to negotiate wages, hours, and leave with (the company).” »
The warring parties understandably disagree on whether Rockstar is generally hostile to unions. Rockstar’s lawyers point out that Rockstar did not fire all union members on the Discord server in October 2025, and that three of the fired workers were not union members (the latter are or were based in Canada and therefore outside the scope of any UK union, although lawyers for the fired workers argue that they “were interested in unionizing their own workplace”).
Rockstar’s lawyers further comment that the company “has never sought to prevent a request for recognition and is now engaging constructively.” Regarding the timing, they claim that management only became aware of the extent of the “reprehensible behavior that was rampant on this platform” after obtaining direct access. They argue that if Rockstar had any real concerns about whether the union met the legal requirements for official recognition, they would have acted much sooner.
The laid-off workers, for their part, cite several formal and verbal warnings their members allegedly received from management regarding soliciting union organizing, prior to the events of October 2025. They suggest that defending union interests or joining the union Discord server could be a negative factor in discussions about work flexibility, performance and promotions.
They also claim that when the IWGB presented a petition on policies returning to power in February 2023, Rockstar refused to engage collectively with union members: “instead, management circulated lists of signatories to human resources managers and contacted them individually, refusing to engage with the union.”
The legal proceedings continue. There’s much more to the full documents, including a lengthy characterization by Rockstar’s lawyers of the company’s “built-in privacy culture” and its “reliance on a culture of respect, non-disparagement, trust.” If you’d like to know more, Game Developer News Editor Chris Kerr was publish large chunks of each repository to Bluesky.
