The GTA 6 firings tribunal is under way, and Rockstar's filings describe an online mode it has never announced

The employment tribunal over the developers Rockstar fired in October 2025 opened its final hearing at the Glasgow Tribunals Centre on Thursday, September 10, 2026. It is listed to run into mid-October, about five weeks before GTA 6 launches, and in its first two days it put more on the record about Rockstar’s security, and about an online mode Rockstar has never announced, than the company has ever published.

The line doing the rounds comes from Rockstar’s own evidence: two of the dismissed staff, it says, “discussed an online 32-player format which was highly confidential at that time.”

Two things before you read the headlines. The 32-player detail first came out in January, not this week. And a tribunal bundle does not tell you how many players GTA 6’s online mode will have when it ships.

What the case is about

Rockstar dismissed 34 people on October 30 and 31, 2025, 31 in the UK and three in Canada. It says they were sharing confidential information in a Discord server. The server was used for union organising, and 31 workers, backed by the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IWGB), say that is why they were dismissed.

	Their position
Rockstar	Gross misconduct, for sharing confidential company information
The workers	Dismissed for organising and blacklisted, with no disciplinary process and no right of appeal. They want reinstatement or compensation

Rockstar’s statement as the hearing opened:

Individuals across the UK and Canada were dismissed for gross misconduct following the sharing of confidential company information, not because of alleged trade union membership or activity. We reject the claims and will defend them vigorously before the tribunal.

The case has already been through two rounds. In January 2026 the tribunal refused the workers interim relief, the emergency order that can keep dismissed staff on pay until a full hearing. In June it refused Rockstar’s application to strike out the blacklisting allegations, so every claim comes to this hearing.

The 32-player line is eight months old

At the January hearing, Rockstar’s barrister Andrew Burns said the workers’ Discord messages revealed a “top secret” feature, and asked the judge to read the message privately rather than say it in open court. The documents carried no reporting restriction. People Make Games read them at the tribunal centre and published what they said.

Rockstar’s written defence, its grounds of resistance, said staff had been sharing

highly confidential and commercially sensitive information relating to the content and features of an unannounced online service. They discussed the specific number of online players planned for this service

and called that number “a material feature of this new title” which “has not yet been revealed by Rockstar”.

The message it was pointing at, from one of the dismissed staff, as reported from the bundle:

Absolutely no idea, they mentioned the large session we did today ‘being difficult to do’ but that was 32 players, not sure how that was difficult.

What September added is Rockstar’s evidence saying it outright. Claimants in the open channel were “candidly referencing game features”, which it calls “one of the most closely guarded secrets of the company”, and “two discussed an online 32-player format which was highly confidential at that time.” Jennifer Kolbe, a Rockstar executive giving evidence, described seeing player numbers shared that way as “extraordinarily alarming”. Images of the filing went up on X on September 10, which is where this week’s coverage started.

What the number does and does not tell you

Claim	Status
Rockstar has an unannounced online service planned for its new title	In Rockstar’s own filing, January 2026
A 32-player online format was confidential inside Rockstar in 2025	In Rockstar’s evidence, September 2026
A Discord message mentions a 32-player “large session”	Reported from the bundle by People Make Games
GTA 6 Online will have 32-player lobbies at launch	Not established. “At that time” describes 2025, not a launch specification
GTA 6 Online launches alongside GTA 6	Not what Rockstar says. It still calls GTA 6 a single-player experience

The 32 is also less dramatic than it sounds. Red Dead Online sessions hold up to 32 players, and GTA Online has run 30-player sessions since it left the PS3 and Xbox 360. A 32-player format would be Rockstar’s existing ceiling, not a new one. And the Discord message is about one “large session” on one day, which reads more like an internal test than a design document.

The firmer part is the sentence without a number in it. In its own pleading, Rockstar calls the player count of an unannounced online service a material feature of its new title. That is the nearest thing to confirmation of GTA 6 Online that exists, and it is still not an announcement: no online mode has been named or dated. We rate the lobby-size claim on the leak tracker.

What Rockstar says it does to keep GTA 6 secret

Rockstar’s opening note, as reported by IGN, sets out why one Discord channel mattered this much:

Guarding the secrets of the unique gameplay and design are akin to Apple protecting the iPhone or Coke protecting its formula.

It describes “the security posture of a Wall Street bank”, and lists what that involves:

A full-time team of five investigators and a director watching for leaks.
Privacy film on its office windows, after drones were used to try to photograph through them.
NDAs for every visitor, escorted contractors, USB drives banned, no photography at work, personal devices kept off company systems, and staff told not to share information with their families.

It divides the Discord server into three “rooms”: a locked committee channel, a members’ channel, and “Room C”, an open channel it puts at about 350 users, including journalists, competitors and former employees. Room C is the “public forum” Rockstar pointed to when it first explained the dismissals in November 2025.

It also puts a number on the August leaks, as reported: “$2 billion was wiped from the Respondent’s parent company’s share value within a few days as that recent hack became public”. We looked at that arithmetic when the leaks began. The fall was real, a good part of it came back within three trading days, and a share price is not a clean measure of what one event cost. It is now an argument in front of a tribunal rather than a headline.

What the dismissed workers say

The workers’ opening submissions tell it through dates:

Date	What the workers say happened
From February 2024	Someone inside the union’s Discord was passing screenshots, membership numbers and names to Rockstar’s HR
October 18, 2025	The union announced it had passed 10% membership, the threshold for applying for statutory recognition in the UK
October 24, 2025	Rockstar’s vice president of information security asked for access to the server and an archive of it
October 29, 2025	Managers received the lists of who was to be dismissed
October 30, 2025	Dismissals began, with pre-written letters, no advance notice and no chance to respond

Within two weeks, they say, membership had fallen back below 10%.

In November 2025 a source close to the union told The Register the server had been backed up and reviewed, and that nothing game-related was revealed on it. Rockstar’s 32-player line is aimed squarely at that.

None of this is a finding. These are each side’s submissions, and the tribunal has not ruled on the merits.

What it changes for GTA 6

Nothing on the calendar. The hearing is listed to finish in mid-October, November 19 has not moved, and nothing in the case touches it.

What it does change is the record on the online mode. We missed the January filing when we published our GTA 6 Online page in August, which told you Rockstar had said nothing at all about one. Publicly that is still true. In a courtroom it has not been since January, and the page now says so.