Rockstar claims it fired dozens of workers last week for leaking company secrets, not for trying to unionise
The GTA company fired more than 30 employees, with one union accusing it of “union-busting”
Rockstar Games has claimed that its decision to fire dozens of employees last week was due to their alleged leaking of company secrets, not their attempts to unionise.
Last week the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IWGB) claimed that Rockstar had fired over 30 staff across its offices in the UK and Canada.
The union alleged last week that the employees were fired because they were part of an IWGB Game Workers Union channel on Discord, and were either members of the union or were attempting to organise a union at Rockstar.
In a strongly worded statement, the IWGB called Rockstar’s move “a brazen act of illegal union busting”, with its president Alex Marshall accusing the company of “a calculated attack on workers organising for a collective voice and to improve their difficult working conditions”.
A spokesperson from Rockstar parent Take-Two denied this last week, saying the employees were fired “for gross misconduct, and no other reason”, but didn’t elaborate on this.
Now, Bloomberg has received an updated statement from Rockstar in which the company claims the “gross misconduct” in question revolved around the sharing of company information in a forum that included non-Rockstar staff.
“Last week, we took action against a small number of individuals who were found to be distributing and discussing confidential information in a public forum, a violation of our company policies,” the statement claims. “This was in no way related to people’s right to join a union or engage in union activities.”
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Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain president Alex Marshall has seemingly dismissed this explanation, maintaining that in the union’s eyes Rockstar engaged in union-busting,
Marshall said that Rockstar was “afraid of hard-working staff privately discussing exercising their rights for a fairer workplace and a collective voice,” adding: “Management are showing they don’t care about delays to GTA 6, and that they’re prioritizing union-busting by targeting the very people who make the game.”
This is the second notable recent incident involving the IWGB. Last month it said it was filing “multiple legal actions” against MindsEye studio Build a Rocket Boy, over what it claims was “disastrous handling of redundancies”.
An open letter addressed to the studio estimated that “a UK majority of 250-300 workers across the company” had been laid off, and claims the studio is at fault, saying: “These layoffs happened because you repeatedly refused to listen to your workforce’s years of experience, resulting in one of the worst video game launches this decade.”
Grand Theft Auto 6 was supposed to have released in fall 2025, but earlier this year Rockstar announced that it had been delayed to May 26, 2026, citing a need for “extra time to deliver at the level of quality you expect and deserve”.
