Fired Rockstar employees fail to get interim pay at UK tribunal

Rockstar chalked up the first win in their dispute with fired employees, as a UK tribunal rejected the former developers their request for interim pay while pursuing allegations of union busting by the studio.

Denying this request, Judge Frances Eccles said that the staff would have had to demonstrate a “pretty good chance of success” in proving they were fired for unionisation efforts, and that they had not managed to do so at this early juncture. Of course, the case will still go ahead and it’s possible for further arguments and evidence to come to light.

A Rockstar spokesperson issued a statement saying:

“The Glasgow Employment Tribunal has rejected the union’s application for interim relief. We welcome the decision, which is consistent with Rockstar’s position throughout.

“We regret that we were put in a position where dismissals were necessary, but we stand by our course of action as supported by the outcome of this hearing.”

The IWGB shared a statement with Eurogamer:

“We are emerging from this hearing, having now had a glimpse of Rockstar’s flimsy grounds for defence, feeling bolstered in our claims that these firings were not just deeply unjust but also plainly unlawful.

“[…] the judge stated in her ruling that: ‘There was no evidence of the respondent having suffered any adverse consequences as a result of these postings’”. The IWGB additionally said Rockstar had broken multiple procedural guidelines with its firing of the affected employees. This included the lack of disciplinary meetings, employees being unable to appeal “until six weeks later”, and zero evidence of an investigation.”

However, further background from the ruling includes that the judge noted the volume of non-employees featured within the IWGB Discord ground, including someone who had written press articles about video games, that some fired employees were based in Canada and thus could not have been union members, and that there were those expressing support for unionisation that were not dismissed.

People Makes Games were in court and shared details of the evidence that was demonstrated.

Per Chris Bratt’s account of viewing the hard copies of submitted evidence, it seems that one employee was fired for expressing that they were not working ‘crunch’ hours yet, about generative AI being approved for use by legal, and further stuff that was branded as so top secret by Rockstar’s barrister that they didn’t want it read out loud in court. Except it could easily be read and is valid to be reported on by PMG. This included complaints over difficulty to book time off, including mention of a team’s staffing size, mentioning 32-player online sessions (which would be an increase in lobby size from 30 players in the current GTA Online).

These details were claimed to be “highly confidential and commercially sensitive” in Rockstar’s arguments, whose stance is that any kind of leaked detail, even seemingly innocuous like if you were in crunch or not, can have a dramatic impact, such as with the billions of dollars wiped off Take Two’s valuation after announcing GTA 6’s delay to November 2026. For that reason, Rockstar fired employees immediately.

So, Rockstar has won this day in court, but there’s a long way to go and a variety of different outcomes. The judge will have to decide, once further arguments and evidence has been presented, whether these dismissals were fair and meet the threshold of “gross misconduct”, and from that point, whether this was Rockstar engaging in union busting.

It’s entirely possible that we end up in a middle ground where Rockstar is able to dodge the union busting charge, but still get dinged for unfair dismissal. In the meantime, unionisation efforts at Rockstar can continue with all those employees that Rockstar couldn’t find cause to dismiss, and certainly will be much wiser about keeping their conversations within a clearly closed group.

Source: Rockstar, PMG, Eurogamer