In October 2025, Rockstar Games terminated 34 workers in a single day: 31 across its UK studios and three at Rockstar Toronto in Canada. All of them were either members of the Independent Workers' Union of Great Britain or active organizers coordinating through a private Discord server. Rockstar's stated reason was distributing confidential information in a public forum, though subsequent reporting from Bloomberg and others found that much of the flagged material involved internal business practices rather than core GTA 6 content. The IWGB disputed Rockstar's account, filed a claim, and included allegations of blacklisting, which the union defines as compiling information about workers engaged in union activity to facilitate discrimination against them.
Rockstar asked the employment tribunal to strike those blacklisting allegations from the case at a preliminary hearing in June. The tribunal refused. All of the IWGB's claims go forward, and a formal trial date is now set: September 10 to October 15, 2026. PC Gamer, The Register, WCCFtech, and RockstarINTEL all reported on the ruling. Game Developer described it as a significant legal blow for the studio. Rockstar has not publicly addressed the tribunal's decision.
The timing puts a trial over the treatment of workers who built GTA 6 running concurrently with the game's final production push and marketing campaign. The IWGB will argue that Rockstar singled out workers for dismissal because of their union membership and organizing activity, and that those workers were blacklisted to limit their options elsewhere in the industry. Rockstar will maintain the firings were for confidentiality breaches. The trial concludes October 15, five weeks before the November 19 launch.