Rockstar Is Spending the Run-Up to Launch in a Glasgow Courtroom, and the Filings Are Already Leaking Secrets

On the morning of September 10, while Miami commissioners were arguing about beach umbrellas, Rockstar’s lawyers were walking into the Glasgow Tribunals Centre past a protest rally. Inside, an employment tribunal began hearing the claim brought by 23 former staff over the dismissals of October 2025, when Rockstar fired 31 workers in the UK, most of them at its Edinburgh headquarters, and 3 more in Canada, as reported by the BBC. The Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain is backing the claimants, the case is listed until October 16, and Judge Lucy Wiseman is presiding.

The claimants want reinstatement or compensation and a finding that the dismissals were unfair. Rockstar told IGN it will defend itself vigorously and that it stands by its course of action. Between those two positions sits a month of testimony that has already told the outside world more about how Rockstar operates than any interview this year.

The union’s version, as set out to the BBC and IGN: the 31 UK workers were discussing working conditions in a private Discord forum, were targeted for union activity, and were dismissed without a disciplinary process or right of appeal. On the day itself, staff in the office were called into meetings, told they were fired with immediate effect and escorted from the building, while remote workers got phone calls lasting around two minutes before being locked out of their accounts. The IWGB also says one dismissed worker, Will Mesilane, lost his work visa, was reported to the Home Office and had to return to Australia with no chance to appeal.

Rockstar’s version is shorter and harder: the group was dismissed for gross misconduct after sharing confidential company information, including specific game features, on a Discord server the company insists was not private. There was, it says, no link to union activity at all, and it did not know which of the people it fired were union members. The tribunal exists because both stories cannot be true.

Buried in Rockstar’s written case is the detail that travelled furthest. The filing describes the leaked material as among the company’s most closely guarded secrets and specifies an online 32-player format, with Rockstar’s lawyer Andrew Burns calling the discussed items ultra secret features and one staff witness describing the Discord discussion as extraordinarily alarming. It is the first time a number has been attached to GTA 6’s online ambitions in anything resembling an official document. A caution before anyone updates a wiki page over it: current GTA Online supports 30 players, or 32 counting spectator slots, so a 32-player format could describe evolution rather than revolution, and a legal filing describing 2025 discussions is not a 2026 design document. We are noting it, not treating it as confirmed.

To justify the severity of the response, Rockstar’s opening note painted a picture of the company as a target under regular assault. Guarding its secrets, the filing argues, is akin to Apple protecting the iPhone or Coca-Cola protecting its formula, and the studio says it maintains the security posture of a Wall Street bank: visitors sign NDAs, contractors are escorted, USB devices are banned, photography is forbidden, personal devices are blocked, and privacy film went onto office windows after drones tried to photograph screens through the glass. The company told the tribunal it now employs five full-time investigators under a director whose job is monitoring leaks, a unit built after the 2022 breach in which 90 videos escaped three years before release. That breach, the filing states, began with a phishing attack that gave the intruder access to an employee’s computer. Fans, the note adds with something close to exhaustion, have monitored coffee runs, pizza deliveries and office traffic volumes to guess the release date.

The first week of evidence produced the claim that will follow this case around. Dismissed QA worker Dayne Oram told the tribunal that after roughly 150 employees signed a petition about remote working in spring 2023, Rockstar North kept an eye on a smaller group of union members among the signatories, and that the petition became the basis of a watch list of people carrying out activities that were considered distasteful, as reported by the BBC. Rockstar’s counsel Thomas Cordrey pushed back hard on the arithmetic: nothing in the signatures identified anyone as a union member, 141 of 154 signers were never dismissed, and the gap between the petition and the firings was two years and eight months. Oram countered that the union members could be inferred from who physically handed the petition in, and said the petition was not the sole reason for his dismissal but was connected to his wider organising.

The hearing is scheduled through October 16. Whatever Judge Wiseman decides, the timing is unavoidable: closing weeks of testimony about the biggest leak crisis in the company’s history, running in parallel with the final month of the biggest launch in the company’s history. Rockstar already won one round in January, when the tribunal refused the union’s application for interim relief, and the union called the company’s defence flimsy in response, per IGN. The full judgment may not arrive until after the game does. Either way, the most detailed public account of how Rockstar protects GTA 6 now exists because Rockstar wrote it down for a courtroom.