A fight over allegations of union busting at Rockstar Games is currently underway at an employment tribunal in Glasgow, Scotland. The Grand Theft Auto 6 studio maintains that over 30 employees were fired last year for gross misconduct, including the leaking of sensitive information about the development of the upcoming game. The fired developers claim the Rockstar just wanted to prevent the UK trade group IWGB from getting a foothold at the company. The latest turn in the proceedings saw Rockstar Lincoln co-studio manager and HR director Charlie Kinloch questioned over one of the more surprising claims in the case: a junior employee who acted as a mole alleging spying on union activity in a separate Discord server.
Dueling sets of claims around this part of last fall’s firings were filed last month, and lawyers are now able to question witnesses related to the case about what happened. Among the claims is that someone under the alias “AB” was passing screenshots of union activity in the Discord server to Kinloch for over two years. This provided studio management with a shocking level of insight into what developers were saying when they thought no one was watching, remarks that would later be used to build a case for their firings. But Kinloch had access to this information for years. Why did it take until October of 2025 for Rockstar to act?
The fired developers contend that information was passed to Kinloch showing the group was just 12 members away–10 percent of the workforce–from the threshold needed to have a recognized union at Rockstar. But Kinloch contends that he never had any interest or knowledge of their union status, and was purely interested in limiting the risk to Rockstar from potential leaks. Here’s an excerpt from today’s questioning:
Lawyer: These comments, these posts on the Discord, which you knew about from March 2025 and June 2025 respectively, were not urgent concerns, which, sorry, they were not serious allegations, which urgently required further investigation to protect Rockstar’s interests, or you would have investigated them in March and June 2025?
Kinloch: It’s important for me to articulate the lens through which I viewed it, viewed these comments at that point, the point where we…in October…this was the point where the business was on the cusp, I later learned, of making a significant announcement about the development of our next project. And through that lens, discussions about working hours, and crunch, and matters to do with the way that the business worked, when viewed through that lens, were, to my mind, incredibly significant.
Coupled with the fact that as we got to that point in the game’s development, media speculation, the public’s interest in the organization was at its absolute peak, where a single one of those comments, if it were to hit the public forum, would cause the company damage, would cause the company hurt, and would paint a picture of the next stages of GTA 6‘s development on the cusp of a major commercially sensitive announcement. That was the lens that I reviewed those comments through in October.
So what was the big announcement? Well, the unionizing developers were fired at the end of October. Just days later, Rockstar Games announced that GTA 6 would be delayed from May 2026 to November 2026. There was immediate speculation about whether there was any connection between the two events, and whether development delays were related to the desire among some developers to unionize. The lawyer representing the fired developers pushed Kinloch on the timing questing”
Lawyer: You say in your IR statement, paragraph 28, “Due to the urgent and serious threat to our business,” do you see that? “We had to act as quickly as possible.” Is18 months as quickly as possible.”
Kinloch: If I can provide some broad explanation there…
Lawyer: If there’s something additional to what you said before about the situation of the business in October 2025 being different by all means.
Kinloch: So the situation was rather different at this moment. Because we had seen that the membership of the Discord was expanding at an exponential rate. And some, perhaps half or more of the people who were joining the Discord at this moment in October were people whose names we could not determine. It seemed that the brazenness of which people were commenting about internal processes or disparaging the company was increasing in line with the exponential growth of the membership of that Discord on the cusp of a very significant announcement [that the] business was about to make. That is the urgency I’m referring to at that time.
Lawyer: Did you say “the brazenness of the comments of the disparagement?”
Kinloch: Yes, seem to be increasing in line with the expansion of the numbers that were joining the Discord
Lawyer: It doesn’t get much more brazen than what we’re looking at there with Jacob Jones. He’s saying the too long don’t read is that I got bullied out by my former director. They’re failing to give me work from home due to my ASD and they’re not redeploying me. So it’s a straightforward allegation of facility discrimination, isn’t it?
Kinloch: Yes. And under the broader context of a period of time in Rockstar’s history where there was no forthcoming major announcements, no immediate development of what will be the biggest game in the history of video games. And looking at it through that lens, that information becomes somewhat less commercially problematic if it were to hit the public sphere. If we fast forward X amount of months, we reach a point where, in my view, the damage that could be caused by a comment such as that would be commercially sensitive and carry a financial incentive for someone to leak.
What I mean by that is if someone had that information to hand as we run up to the release of GTA 6, they could make money from that. They could generate clicks from that and they could create a story from that. That would be commercial but commercially valuable to the person who takes the information reports on it and commercially damaging to the business at that critical juncture.
The studio manager goes on to discuss how the growing membership of the Discord server, full of names the company didn’t know, led to a rapid increase in the risk of damaging proprietary information getting out. There are conflicting claims about the security of the server. The fired employees maintain that users were kept siloed in different channels and identities were authenticated before people were admitted into the union discussion channels specifically. Rockstar, meanwhile, has claimed that at least one journalist was present in one of the channels, and closely guarded secrets like a mysterious “32 player format” were discussed at one point.
But one of the key witnesses as to Rockstar’s intent with monitoring the developer Discord server remains the secret “mole” referred to as “AB.” While Rockstar maintains that AB shared information with management about worker activities of their own volition, AB is not among the witnesses that will be allowed to be questioned during the hearing. At one point the lawyer for the fired developers argued with the judge about the need to get Kinloch or others at Rockstar on the record about AB’s intents and unwillingness to let the person speak for themselves in order to establish an “adverse inference” in support of its argument that Rockstar paid AB and others with “time off in lieu in exchange for spying on their colleagues’ union activity.”
The hearing will continue next week, and other witnesses in Rockstar management sound likely to be called to testify. GTA 6, meanwhile, is just over a month away from finally releasing. Fired employees have asked players not to boycott the game but to but to support their legal battle instead.
