Following the firing of 30 employees last week and accusations that this was an attempt to stymie efforts by employees to unionise, Rockstar has issued a statement that says the employees were fired for sharing company information in a public forum.
In a statement to Bloomberg, a Rockstar spokesperson said, “Last week, we took action against a small number of individuals who were found to be distributing and discussing confidential information in a public forum, a violation of our company policies. This was in no way related to people’s right to join a union or engage in union activities.”
All of the affected employees – with 30 to 40 people fired from across the company’s studios in the UK and Canada – were part of a private trade union chat on Discord. There were outsiders within this chat, but they were there from the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IWGB) as labor organisers.
Following the dismissals last week, the IWGB branded it as “a brazen act of illegal union busting”, with IWGB president Alex Marshall calling it “a calculated attack on workers organising for a collective voice and to improve their difficult working conditions.”
Marshall has responded to Rockstar’s new allegations to say the company is “afraid of hard-working staff privately discussing exercising their rights for a fairer workplace and a collective voice. Management are showing they don’t care about delays to GTA VI, and that they’re prioritising union-busting by targeting the very people who make the game.”
Rockstar has always been a very secretive studio, something that goes hand-in-hand with the popularity of their games to make leaks of their work huge news stories. For GTA 6, the game has had two very high-profile leaking moments, with a 2022 hack, and then the friend of an employee’s son leaking more screens and details in 2023. That latter moment was quickly followed by Rockstar calling employees to return to offices for work, having necessarily loosened this requirement and allowed work from home since 2020 – we all know why that was…
Grand Theft Auto 6 is expected to release on 26th May 2026, as Rockstar eventually decided that they needed more time, despite Take Two execs constantly stating that GTA 6 was on target for this year. But that’s been good news for 2025’s slate of releases, so where games like Battlefield 6 had been fairly tentative about launching this year, they could launch with more confidence. That game’s knocked it out of the park, as well, no doubt helped just a little by not having to compete with GTA 6 for the average gamer’s wallet.
