Rockstar court representative says studio fired GTA 6 developers for discussing a ‘top secret’ 32-player online mode in private Discord, which it was ‘gravely concerned’ to have discovered
- Court documents from a UK court revealed new Discord messages from the 30+ fired GTA6 employees
- A Rockstar representative told the court that employees allegedly discussed a “top secret” game feature that had not been announced.
- The feature was apparently a 32-player online mode for GTA6
Rockstar Games reportedly licensed the 30+ Grand Theft Auto 6 developers in late 2025 for discussing a 32-player online mode on a private Discord channel.
After Rockstar laid off 34 employees in October, which the studio said was due to leaking company secrets in Discord that included “specific gaming features,” the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IWGB) filed a lawsuit against Rockstar. He accused the studio of union busting and sought emergency relief from the Glasgow employment tribunal.
This month, a British employment tribunal ruled against forcing the RGT studio to pay interim relief to laid-off employees, and now new details of the decision have been revealed.
As People Makes Games reports, during the forum, the lawyer representing Rockstar, Andrew Burns, referenced a “top secret” feature that was allegedly discussed on the Discord channel by the fired employees.
Although Burns did not elaborate on this feature in court, it was later revealed in court documents which were not subject to the reporting restrictions and which were viewed by PMG at the Glasgow Tribunals Centre.
This feature was apparently a 32 player online mode for GTA6.
PMG shared Discord messages from the court documents in its video, explaining that the mode discussion took place when a fired employee wrote about trying to request time off from the studio.
The conversation continued detailing how Rockstar limited the number of employees who could take time off at one time, before one employee mentioned a “big session” that took place in October 2025 that Rockstar found “difficult to do” with 32 people.
In response to an unseen message, the fired employee said: “Absolutely no idea, they mentioned the big session we did today was ‘hard to do’ but it had 32 players, I don’t know how hard it was.”
Another employee later criticized the policy, writing: “Looks like you have multiple QA tester studios, surely someone can manage to organize a 32 player session and let people have their free time…”
According to PMG, these are the messages Burns was referring to when talking about the “top secret” gaming feature.
Rockstar was said to be “gravely concerned” when it discovered its employees were discussing “highly confidential and commercially sensitive information relating to the content and functionality of an unannounced online service.”
“They discussed the precise number of online players planned for this service – an important feature of this new title – which has not yet been revealed by Rockstar,” reads Rockstar’s Grounds of Resistance.
Whereas GTA 5‘s online mode offers 32-player sessions, so it’s not difficult to determine if this feature was likely GTA6The unannounced online mode of .
GTA6 was delayed shortly after the shots and is now scheduled to launch on November 19, 2026.
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