Rockstar faces final employment tribunal over 31 fired GTA 6 workers this week
The final employment tribunal hearing between Rockstar and 31 fired GTA 6 developers begins September 10 and runs until October 16. The IWGB union says the workers were unlawfully dismissed and blacklisted for union activity; Rockstar maintains they breached confidentiality agreements. The workers seek reinstatement or compensation.
A legal battle reaches its final stage
Two weeks after the Netflix premiere of "An Extended Look", and a little over two months before Grand Theft Auto VI's release, Rockstar Games is back in a courtroom — or rather, an employment tribunal. This week, the final hearing begins in the dispute between the studio and 31 former Rockstar North employees who were dismissed in October 2025 while working on GTA 6. The case, brought by the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain (IWGB), opens on Thursday, September 10 at Glasgow Employment Tribunal and is scheduled to run until October 16 (Eurogamer, IWGB).
What the union alleges
The IWGB claims the workers were unlawfully fired for their union activity and then blacklisted — a practice in which information about workers involved in a union is compiled to facilitate discrimination. The union also argues the dismissals were unlawful in their process: employees were refused a disciplinary process and any right of appeal. Rockstar has consistently said the firings were for gross misconduct, pointing to messages exchanged in a private IWGB Discord channel that it claims breached confidentiality agreements. The employees say they were discussing salaries and HR issues — exactly the sort of conversations a union channel exists to host (Eurogamer).
A long road to this hearing
Rockstar tried to have the blacklisting allegations thrown out earlier this year. The tribunal rejected that application, meaning the studio must now answer the claims in full at this final hearing (IWGB). The dismissal itself was abrupt: workers at the office were called into meetings, told they were being fired with immediate effect and escorted from the building. Those working remotely learned of their fate in phone calls lasting around two minutes before being locked out of their accounts. One of the dismissed workers, Will Mesilane, had to return to Australia after Rockstar withdrew his work visa and reported him to the Home Office, without giving him a chance to appeal (IWGB).
The firings did not go unnoticed outside the studio. Protests were held outside the offices of Rockstar's parent company Take-Two in London, Paris and New York, the matter was raised in Prime Minister's Questions, and the then Prime Minister Keir Starmer said: "Every worker has the right to join a trade union and we're determined to strengthen workers' rights and ensure they don't face unfair consequences for being part of a union" (Eurogamer).
What the workers want
The 31 former employees are seeking reinstatement or, failing that, compensation, as well as a formal finding from the tribunal that their dismissals were unfair (Eurogamer). They are not asking fans to boycott GTA VI; instead, they are asking supporters to contribute to a legal fund that is covering the considerable costs of bringing the case. Former employee Jason Lewis, an IWGB member, said: "For almost a year, the truth about what happened to us has been buried by Rockstar and surrounded by speculation. Now we finally get the chance to put it on the record" (Eurogamer). IWGB president Alex Marshall put it more bluntly: "We believe Rockstar has tried to get away with Grand Theft Employment Rights" (Eurogamer).
The bigger picture
The case sits alongside ongoing negotiations between Rockstar and the IWGB over formal union recognition. If an agreement is reached, Rockstar would become the biggest recognised unionised game studio in the UK. The dispute also gave birth to the Rockstar Game Workers Union, which continues to grow and has made further allegations against the company around crunch, the weaponisation of bonus payments and gender-based pay inequality (Eurogamer).
What happens next
The hearing runs from September 10 to October 16, concluding just weeks before GTA 6 launches on November 19. Whatever the outcome, it will be decided in the full glare of the biggest release in entertainment history — and it could set a precedent for how the games industry treats workers who organise.
Update — September 9: the story reaches the French mainstream
One day before the hearing opens, the case has moved from the gaming press to the front of the general news cycle in France. On September 9, Le Figaro — one of the country's largest newspapers — published a feature in its work-life section, written with AFP, on the human cost of the October 2025 layoffs. Its headline gives the floor to the dismissed workers themselves: "«Nous avons perdu nos emplois, nos revenus, notre communauté»" — "We lost our jobs, our incomes, our community" (Le Figaro).
The piece frames GTA VI's imminent release as "also the stage for a trial arising from a wave of layoffs of several dozen people," and recaps the AFP reporting on the dispute: the hearing runs from September 10 to October 16 at the Glasgow Employment Tribunal, just weeks before the game launches on November 19 (Le Figaro). For the 31 former employees, the mainstream attention arriving on the eve of the hearing is another sign that their fight is no longer a niche industry story — it is being told, in their own words, to the general public.
Update — 2026-09-10 (the hearing opens)
The final hearing opened on September 10, and the fired developers made their case outside the courtroom as much as inside it. Outside the Glasgow Tribunals Centre, supporters gathered with IWGB banners and homemade placards — "What's disgusting? Union busting" and "404: Rockstar's respect for workers not found" among them — as the case finally reached its last stage (Eurogamer; PC Gamer).
The centrepiece of the morning was a speech by Rachel Crawford, a former Rockstar employee who worked on Grand Theft Auto V and Red Dead Redemption 2 and was among the workers dismissed in October 2025. Recorded on video by IWGB Game Workers co-founder Austin Kelmore, Crawford described being fired on October 30, 2025, "without warning and without even being given a clear answer about what it was I'd done to deserve it," adding that within minutes she "was out the door, feeling humiliated and ashamed" (PC Gamer; Eurogamer).
"The modern workplace runs on fear: fear of speaking out, fear of being punished, fear of being fired, losing your livelihood and even your home," she said. She described that fear as something that "closes our minds, our hearts, and our horizons" and "makes us small, sad and hopeless" — before turning it around: "But today, we are fighting fear. This long-awaited hearing is an opportunity to put fear in its place below us. Over the next five weeks we will face fear and show that we refuse to be silenced by it" (Eurogamer).
Crawford also pointed beyond the hearing room, noting that many of her former colleagues "have taken up the union's flag and are now pushing for the recognition, protection, and power that fear has denied them for too long," and closing with a simple line: "Union makes us strong" (Eurogamer). As during the run-up to the hearing, the message to players was not to boycott GTA VI but to back the workers' legal fund if they can (Eurogamer; PC Gamer).
The legal picture is unchanged from before the hearing: Rockstar must now answer the allegations of unlawful dismissal and blacklisting in full after failing to have the case thrown out earlier this year, and the IWGB is seeking either reinstatement or compensation for the 31 former employees, plus a formal finding from the tribunal that their dismissals were unfair (Eurogamer). The hearing is expected to run for around five weeks, taking it close to GTA VI's November 19 release.
Update — 2026-09-11 (Rockstar's opening defence)
Both sides set out their opening statements as the hearing got under way in Glasgow, and the case has narrowed to a single question: what was said on a private IWGB Discord server, and who was listening (Eurogamer).
The union's account is the more striking. The IWGB alleges Rockstar "clandestinely monitored" that server through a mole from "at least" February 2024 — more than two and a half years — and says its opening statement documents dozens of meetings between Rockstar's cyber-security staff and the informant over roughly 21 months, with a sharp uptick around October 2025, when the union passed the 10 percent membership threshold needed for UK recognition (Eurogamer; Rock Paper Shotgun). The former employees argue the coincidence is too convenient: after watching the server for almost two years without disciplinary action, Rockstar supposedly discovered misconduct requiring immediate dismissal at exactly the moment the union became recognisable (Eurogamer).
Rockstar rejects that framing. It insists the dismissals were about leaked game features, progress and launch timelines, not union activity, and says it did not know the people it fired were organising (IGN). Its opening note instead describes what it calls an "embedded culture of confidentiality", 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 Rockstar adopts "the security posture of a Wall Street bank" (IGN; Eurogamer).
The detail that has travelled furthest is the security apparatus itself: visitors must sign NDAs, contractors are escorted by security, remote work is severely restricted, USB drives are banned, photography is forbidden and personal devices are blocked from Rockstar's systems. The company says it was even forced to put privacy films on its buildings after drones tried to photograph through office windows, and it cites the 2022 phishing leak of dozens of unfinished GTA 6 videos — plus the recent CyberLeek blackmail attempt, which it claims wiped $2 billion from its parent company's share value (IGN; Eurogamer).
For scale, IGN puts the total number of dismissals at 34 — 31 in the UK and three in Canada. The hearing is scheduled to run until around October 16, keeping the dispute alive into the final weeks before GTA 6 launches on November 19 (IGN).
Update — 2026-09-12 (the security story goes wide)
Within a day of Rockstar's opening note becoming public, the security apparatus stopped being a subplot of the labour dispute and became the story itself. Dark Horizons, GameSpot and the New York aggregator Northeast Times all led on the studio's "extreme" measures, and the detail that travelled furthest was one absent from the first wave of coverage: a dedicated anti-leak unit, five full-time investigators and a director, whose job is to watch for potential disclosures (Northeast Times).
IGN's follow-up filled in the history behind those measures. Rockstar says drones flown by outsiders photographed employees through the windows of its offices, forcing it to apply privacy film to the glass; on-site external storage is banned, photography is prohibited for all visitors and remote work is heavily restricted (IGN). Its note also lists staff dismissed for leaking in previous years — one in Lincoln, UK, in April 2025, one in the United States in November 2023 and one in India in November 2025 (IGN).
The stakes are put in numbers. Rockstar argues that had the Discord comments at the centre of the case gone public they could have moved Take-Two's share price, pointing out that when it announced GTA 6's six-month delay to November 19, 2026, the company's market value fell $3.75 billion in a single day (IGN). It repeats the comparison first reported on September 11 — guarding the game's secrets is "akin to Apple protecting the iPhone or Coke protecting its formula" — and its claim to adopt "the security posture of a Wall Street bank."
The legal core is unchanged: the IWGB says the 34 dismissals were about union organising, Rockstar says they were about leaked game features, and the Glasgow hearing runs until around October 16, weeks before launch (IGN).
Update — 2026-10-27 (a date and a ballot)
The hearing now has an end date, and the negotiations mentioned above have a timetable. Closing arguments are scheduled for November 17 and 18, per Kotaku and Rock Paper Shotgun, after the case was extended past its original October finish. Two days later, on November 19, GTA VI launches.
The recognition talks have also turned into a vote: Rockstar's UK staff will ballot on recognising the Rockstar Game Workers Union between November 12 and 26, on a draft deal covering pay and bonuses, overtime, redundancies, flexible working and generative AI policy (IWGB, via Rock Paper Shotgun). Rockstar's head of publishing, Jennifer Kolbe, told Bloomberg's Jason Schreier that "if they want a union, they will have a union" (via Engadget). Full breakdown: Rockstar's UK staff vote on union recognition from 12 November.
