Rockstar Reveals Union Discord Mole in Legal Battle

In October 2025, Rockstar Games terminated 34 employees, primarily based in the UK, citing "gross misconduct." The company alleged that these individuals risked the leakage of confidential information by participating in a Discord server established by union organizers. The dismissed workers and their legal representatives have since taken Rockstar to court, accusing the studio of removing them specifically to prevent the union from gaining enough members to win official recognition under UK law.

This week, both parties filed opening submissions at an employment tribunal in Glasgow. Take-Two Interactive, the parent company of Rockstar, shared these documents with media outlets. The filings comprise over 100 pages of claims and counterclaims, with thousands of pages of evidence scheduled for discussion in the coming weeks. These documents provide a detailed timeline of events leading up to the dismissals, including the revelation that Rockstar had an insider passing them information about the Discord server's users.

The Origin and Structure of the Discord Server

According to the court filing from the ousted workers, Rockstar employees affiliated with the IWGB Game Workers union set up what became known as the Rockstar Game Workers Union Discord Server in 2022. Their lawyers claim that prior to this, there was "no official workplace channel through which concerns could be discussed independently of management." By the time of the October 2025 dismissals, the server had approximately 340 members.

Rockstar management did not have direct access to the server prior to October 2025. However, the former workers and their legal team allege that from at least February 2024, Charlie Kinloch, the Rockstar HR director, had been receiving information from a junior employee regarding trade union activity inside the server. They claim that over 21 months, at least 26 meetings or communications took place between Mr. Kinloch and this junior employee concerning the server, with roughly half of them initiated by Mr. Kinloch himself.

The "mole" is said to have supplied screenshots and recordings, reported on union meetings, training sessions, and union membership numbers, and identified individual union activists. On October 7, 2025, they allegedly informed Kinloch that the union was 12 members away from the statutory threshold for recognition, which is 10% of the workforce. The union eventually reached this milestone on October 18, with Kinloch learning of this on October 20, according to the fired workers. During this period, Rockstar management obtained logins for the server, with Abid Ansari, Rockstar's vice president of information security, eventually signing in to download the contents of the Announcements and General channels. Rockstar began firing members of the Discord at the end of the month.

Conflicting Accounts of Security and Access

Rockstar's own court submission aligns with some of these details. The company's lawyers mention three "whistleblowers" on the Discord who reported security concerns, including one member who had been leaking information to Rockstar management "for over two and a half years." Rockstar's lawyers state that between October 13 and 16, a member of the server supplied Rockstar bosses with login details. Prior to this, they claim, Rockstar was "largely in the dark" about events on the server, save for "occasional glimpses" provided by their primary "whistleblower."

The court filings offer wildly contrasting views about the security of the union Discord server itself. The unionised workers argue that the server was "invite-only, access-restricted and subject to verification through Rockstar’s own internal Slack platform." They explain that people with an invite link were placed in a waiting room until approved by moderators, who could verify them using Rockstar's own Slack channels before granting "substantive access." They point out that "no confidential information is known to have leaked from the Server into the public domain."

Rockstar, however, argues that "there were numerous ways in which the information on the Discord was vulnerable," including by a deliberate leak from a discontented Discord user, by loss or theft of personal devices, by successful phishing or social engineering, or by hacking of Discord itself. They support this by stating that somebody was, in fact, leaking information from the Discord: the aforesaid "whistleblower."

Rockstar offers a layperson breakdown of the Discord server's structure in their filing, portraying it as essentially consisting of three "rooms." One was for IWGB union committee members only, or members of specific working groups, which Rockstar couldn't access at all before a court-ordered disclosure on August 3. A second was for general IWGB members, which Rockstar also couldn't access initially. The third "room" consisted of almost 350 people, some of whom were anonymous, while others identified themselves as Rockstar employees.

Rockstar claims that "26 on an initial analysis" of the people in the third "room" were not actually employees, while 10 others were former staff, including a few who had "left in poor standing with the business and were therefore well motivated to cause harm to it." The ousted workers acknowledge that "former employees" were members of the Discord but say they were confined to certain channels and not present in the General and Announcements channels to which Rockstar initially gained direct access. Rockstar also repeats an earlier accusation that one member of the wider Discord group was a working journalist.

Allegations of Misconduct and Union Suppression

As for the incriminating information being circulated, Rockstar alleges that it ranged from discussion of digital and real-world security measures, through internal correspondence such as HR emails, to "closely guarded secrets" about game projects, including an "online 32 player format" for a "highly confidential" project. They also claim that Discord users shared "many, many pieces of information" regarding Grand Theft Auto VI's development, including discussion of delays, overtime, and crunch.

The former workers, meanwhile, argue that "no posts were witnessed as disclosing the date on which Grand Theft Auto VI would be released, the date of any trailer, or comparable confidential release information." They state that "the posts generally discussed workplace policies which were essential to trade union organising." They comment that many of the posts about office goings-on considered "egregious" by Rockstar were "trivial as matters of discipline but... legitimate as matters of concern to a trade union representing its members."

Both documents include a section on the other side's use of bad language. Rockstar's lawyers accuse the union Discord members of "openly and vituperatively disparaging and defaming" company management. In contrast, the former workers point out that "profanity was routinely used by management and staff at Rockstar without disciplinary consequence." According to the former workers, one employee was told after joining Rockstar "that the use of the word 'cunt' was an 'apparently acceptable use of language in Scotland' and was used by management regularly."

The lawyers for the fired workers allege that the abrupt dismissal of 34 staff had "an immediate chilling effect" on the Discord server. Membership apparently fell "from around 390 to 261 within days, with 136 people leaving and only nine new joins," while "11 Rockstar employees cancelled their IWGB memberships in the following week." They broadly claim that Rockstar "identified and removed members and activists of a rapidly growing trade union, including many of those central to its organising structures, for the purpose of disabling the wider organisation and of deterring the remainder, and, in particular, preventing the union obtaining the right to negotiate pay, hours and holidays with [the company]."

The warring parties naturally disagree about whether Rockstar is hostile in general towards unions. Rockstar's lawyers point out that Rockstar did not dismiss every last union member on the Discord server in October 2025, and that three of the workers dismissed were not union members. The latter are or were based in Canada and so outside the scope of any UK union, though the lawyers for the fired workers argue that they "were interested in unionising their own workplace."

Rockstar's lawyers further comment that the company "has never sought to prevent a recognition request and now one has been made is engaging constructively with it." Regarding the timing, they contend that management didn't realise the extent of the "misconduct that was rife on that platform" until gaining direct access. They argue that if Rockstar had harboured real concerns about the union reaching the statutory requirement for official recognition, they would have acted on them much earlier.

The ousted workers, meanwhile, cite several alleged formal and verbal warnings their members had received from managers about soliciting union organisation, prior to the events of October 2025. They suggest that union advocacy or membership of the union Discord server could be a negative factor in discussion of flexible working, performance, and promotions.

They also claim that when the IWGB presented a petition about return-to-office policies in February 2023, Rockstar refused to engage with union members as a collective. Instead, management circulated lists of the signatories to HR managers and contacted them individually, declining to engage with the union.

The court proceedings continue. There is a lot more in the full filings, including a lengthy characterisation from Rockstar's lawyers of the company's "embedded culture of confidentiality" and its "reliance on a culture of respect, non-disparagement, trust and confidence." The legal battle between Rockstar and the dismissed developers remains ongoing, with both sides presenting their cases to the tribunal in Glasgow.