A fight over alleged union busting at Rockstar Games is currently underway at an employment tribunal in Glasgow, Scotland. The Grand Theft Auto 6 studio says more than 30 employees were fired last year for serious misconduct, including leaking sensitive information about the upcoming game’s development. The fired developers say Rockstar simply wanted to prevent British trade group IWGB from gaining a foothold in the company. The latest twist in the proceedings saw Charlie Kinloch, Rockstar Lincoln’s co-studio head and chief human resources officer, questioned about one of the most surprising claims in the case: a junior employee who acted as a mole alleging spying on union activities on a separate Discord server.
A series of dueling complaints surrounding that part of last fall’s firings were filed last month, and lawyers can now question witnesses linked to the case about what happened. Among the allegations is that a person under the pseudonym “AB” was transmitting screenshots of union activity on the Discord server to Kinloch for more than two years. This provided studio management with shocking insight into what developers said when they thought no one was watching, remarks that would later be used to justify their firings. But Kinloch had access to this information for years. Why did we have to wait until October 2025 for Rockstar to act?
The laid-off developers say information was passed to Kinloch showing the group was just 12 members, or 10 percent of the workforce, away from the threshold needed to have a recognized union at Rockstar. But Kinloch claims he never had any interest or knowledge of their union status and was only interested in limiting the risk of potential leaks for Rockstar. Here is an excerpt from today’s questions:
Lawyer: These comments, these messages on Discord, which you were aware of in March 2025 and June 2025 respectively, were not urgent concerns, which, sorry, were not serious allegations, which urgently required further investigation to protect Rockstar’s interests, or would you have investigated them in March and June 2025?
Kinloch: It’s important for me to express the prism through which I saw it, seeing those comments at that time, the time when we… in October… was the time when the company was about to, I later learned, make a major announcement about the development of our next project. And with that in mind, the discussions about working hours, difficulties and questions related to how the business operated, seen from that perspective, were, in my opinion, incredibly meaningful. Added to the fact that as we got to this point in the game’s development, media speculation and public interest in the organization was at its peak, where a single such comment, if it were to be released on the public forum, would cause damage to the company, cause harm to the company and paint a picture of the next stages of GTA 6 development on the cusp of a commercially sensitive announcement. It was with this in mind that I reviewed these comments in October.
So what was the big announcement? Well, the union developers were laid off at the end of October. A few days later, Rockstar Games announced that GTA6 would be delayed from May 2026 to November 2026. There was immediate speculation whether there was a connection between the two events and whether the development delays were linked to some developers’ desire to unionize. The lawyer representing the fired developers pressed Kinloch’s timing:
Lawyer: You say in your IR statement, paragraph 28: “Due to the urgent and serious threat to our activities”, do you see that? “We had to act as quickly as possible. » That’s 18 months as quickly as possible.
Kinloch: If I can provide a general explanation here…
Lawyer: If there’s anything more to what you said previously, about where the company was in October 2025 that was certainly different.
Kinloch: So the situation was rather different at that time. Because we had seen that the number of Discord members was growing at an exponential rate. And some, maybe half or more, of the people joining the Discord at that time in October were people whose names we couldn’t determine. It seemed that the boldness with which people commented on internal processes or disparaged the company increased alongside the exponential growth in the number of members of this Discord, on the cusp of a very important announcement (that the) company was about to make. This is what I am referring to as emergency at this time.
Lawyer: You said “the audacity of denigrating remarks? »
Kinloch: Yes, it seems to be increasing along with the increase in people joining the Discord…
Lawyer: It doesn’t get much more brazen than what we see there with Jacob Jones. He says that if I haven’t read for too long, it’s because I was harassed by my old manager. They won’t give me work from home because of my ASD and they won’t redeploy me. So this is a simple allegation of discrimination in establishments, correct?
Kinloch: Yes. And in the broader context of a period in Rockstar’s history where there have been no major announcements coming, no immediate development of what will be the biggest game in gaming history. And looking at it this way, this information would become a little less commercially problematic if it reached the public sphere. If we fast forward X months, we reach a point where, in my opinion, the damage that could be caused by such a comment would be commercially sensitive and would financially incentivize someone to disclose. What I mean by this is that if anyone had this information at hand before the publication of GTA6they could make money from it. They could generate clicks from that and create a story from that. This would be commercial, but commercially valuable to the person collecting the information about it and commercially detrimental to the company at this critical time.
The studio director goes on to explain how the Discord server’s growing number of members, filled with names the company didn’t know, led to a rapid increase in the risk of damaging confidential information being disclosed. There are conflicting claims regarding server security. The fired employees contend that users were siled into different channels and that identities were authenticated before people were specifically admitted to union chat channels. Rockstar, meanwhile, claimed that at least one journalist was present on one of the channels, and closely guarded secrets like a mysterious “32-player format” were mentioned at one point.
But one of the main witnesses to Rockstar’s intention to monitor the developer’s Discord server remains the secret “mole” called “AB”. Although Rockstar claims that AB shared information with management about workers’ activities on its own volition, AB is not among the witnesses who will be allowed to be questioned during the hearing. At one point, the fired developers’ attorney argued with the judge about the need to put Kinloch or others at Rockstar into the record about AB’s intentions and the refusal to let the person speak for himself in order to establish an “adverse inference” to support his argument that Rockstar paid AB and others with “compensatory leave in exchange for spying on the union activities of their colleagues.”
The hearing will continue next week and more witnesses from Rockstar management are likely to be called to testify. GTA6meanwhile, is just over a month away from its final release. The fired employees asked players not to boycott the game but instead to support their legal battle.
Gn tech
