Rockstar Games and the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain (IWGB) have traded blows in fiery opening statements during the final employment tribunal hearing, relating to the sudden firing of 31 Rockstar North employees nearly a year ago.
In their opening statements - made as the hearing got underway in Glasgow, Scotland, yesterday, and shared in full with Eurogamer - the opposing organisations outlined a case hinging on a private IWGB Discord server and what was and wasn't talked about there. It's on this Discord server that hundreds of Rockstar employees hoped to organise and create a legally recognised Rockstar union, but it's also here that Rockstar alleged confidential information was disclosed.
The 31 fired Rockstar North employees, represented by the IWGB, claimed Rockstar was "clandestinely monitoring" this Discord server through a "mole" since "at least" February 2024, but that Rockstar only took punitive action days after membership numbers reached the pivotal 10 percent figure (of a larger workforce) needed for unions to be recognised by UK law.
In the IWGB's opening statement, it said: "[Rockstar] asks the Tribunal to accept that, after monitoring the Server for almost two years without taking any disciplinary action, it happened to discover misconduct requiring the [former employees'] immediate dismissal fortuitously at exactly the moment when the union had acquired the capacity to seek recognition. The [former employees] say that the contemporaneous evidence points to a much simpler, realistic and credible explanation: [Rockstar] struck at the union because it had become capable of exercising collective power."
The IWGB statement documented dozens of alleged meetings between Rockstar's cyber security person and the "mole" over 21 months, with a drastic uptick in activity around October 2025, as the 10 percent threshold was reached. It claimed that "much of the union's organising cadre" was targeted by Rockstar in the resulting "decimation", and that those employees - which were invited to brief "catch-up meetings" by Rockstar - were handed pre-prepared dismissal letters and escorted from their workplace with no discussion or opportunity to defend themselves.
Rockstar, naturally, disagreed. Much of its case seemed to rest on having the tribunal understand what it called the "embedded culture of confidentiality" it operates with, as well as the "exceptional value and prestige" of Grand Theft Auto 6. Rockstar said it adopts "the security posture of a Wall Street Bank" to guard its secrets in the way Coca-Cola would its secret "formula" or Apple would its technology.
Accordingly, Rockstar said any visitors to its offices "must" sign NDAs and that any contractors on site are escorted by security. Remote working is "severely restricted", external storage devices are "banned", photography is "strictly forbidden", and personal phones, tablets, and laptops are "blocked" from connecting to Rockstar systems.
Rockstar claimed it sustains "regular assaults on its security and systems" and that "it has had to put privacy films on its building after drones were used to try and photograph through office windows". It also cited an alleged phishing attack that supposedly resulted in "dozens of videos of unfinished development footage of GTA 6" leaking onto Slack in 2022. As a result, the company said it employs a full-time team of five investigators and a director "to monitor for and investigate potential data leaks".
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.eurogamer.net/rockstar-gta-6-fired-employees-tribunal-statements
