In October, Grand Theft Auto 6 developer Rockstar Games fired over 30 employees without warning in multiple offices in the UK and Canada, all of whom were members of a private trade union Discord channel. In the months since, despite its parent company Take-Two Interactive's insistence that the studio terminated those employees "for gross misconduct, and for no other reason," Rockstar has offered little justification to indicate the firings were anything other than retaliation for attempted workplace organizing.
According to a statement given by the Independent Workers' Union of Great Britain (IWGB) in response to the firings, the terminated employees were all either union members or pursuing worker organization at the studio.
"Rockstar has just carried out one of the most blatant and ruthless acts of union busting in the history of the games industry," IWGB president Alex Marshall said in the union's October statement. "This flagrant contempt for the law and for the lives of the workers who bring in their billions is an insult to their fans and the global industry."
Following the initial reporting, Rockstar elaborated on its claims against the fired workers, alleging that the terminated employees had been "distributing confidential information in a public forum" in violation of company policy. The IWGB has maintained that those accusations are a misrepresentation of legally-protected private conversations where the only non-Rockstar participants were union representatives. That same week, IWGB-organized protests began outside Take-Two's London offices.
In mid-November, the IWGB initiated formal legal action against Rockstar Games over the firings, saying that Rockstar refused to meet with union representatives and "resolve the matter through negotiation."
"We are confident that what we’ve seen here is plain and simple union busting, and we will mount a full legal defence with our expert group of caseworkers, legal officers and barristers," Marshall said in the announcement of the IWGB's lawsuit. "Employers like Rockstar would do well to understand that private spaces such as trade union Discord servers have protections, and that their company's contractual clauses do not supersede UK law."
Protests continued throughout November, spreading from London to Paris and Edinburgh, while over 200 Rockstar employees delivered letters to company management demanding the reinstatement of their fired coworkers. Soon, the escalating labor dispute rose to the attention of the UK parliament, with Edinburgh West MP Christine Jardine urging fellow Ministers to "support workers who have lost their jobs, and stop this from happening again."
By mid-December, even Prime Minister Keir Starmer had weighed in on the firings. During the weekly session of the Prime Minister's Questions, Starmer called the dispute a "deeply concerning case," as "every worker has the right to join a trade union, and we are determined to strengthen workers' and ensure they don't face unfair consequences for being part of a union." Meanwhile, in a meeting with MPs Chris Murray, Tracy Gilbert, and Scott Arthur, Rockstar evidently failed to make a compelling argument to justify its firings.
"The meeting only entrenched my concerns about the process Rockstar used to dismiss so many of their staff members," Murray said. "I was not assured their process paid robust attention to UK employment law, I was not convinced that this course of action was necessary, and alarmingly, I did not leave informed on exactly what these 31 people had done to warrant their immediate dismissal."
Despite the worker outrage, parliamentary skepticism, and general antipathy, Rockstar has maintained its insistence that the fired workers divulged company secrets, saying in additional statements that the employees had "distributed and discussed confidential information (including specific game features from upcoming and unannounced titles)" and that the Discord where the employees communicated had hundreds of users present, including a user that the company characterized as a games journalist.
The IWGB contends that these are further misrepresentations from Rockstar, as that user in question had previously written "a couple of articles for a paper, but is a game worker and union rep and was in the group in that capacity."
"Rockstar's latest statement is littered with falsehoods and disinformation—they have given multiple, conflicting reasons to explain why the workers were fired, as if attempting to reverse engineer a rationale for the dismissals," the IWGB said. "Once again, they have chosen to mischaracterize workers speaking about their working conditions in a private forum as 'leaking information.' It is hard to understand this statement as anything but a desperate attempt to deflect from the global scrutiny they have come under over the last month."
The controversy around the recent filings isn't Rockstar's first labor controversy: In 2018, reports revealed a workplace culture in which "death march" development crunch was the norm—a dysfunction the studio has reportedly worked to repair in recent years. But with GTA 6's launch looming later in the year, Rockstar is entering 2026 entangled in a scandal seemingly of its own making—and without a convincing reason for doing so.
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