Late last year, Rockstar Games laid off 34 employees on accusations of misconduct, sparking massive outrage and controversy. The individuals, who are primarily from the United Kingdom, have since sued Rockstar on union-busting grounds, something the company had been accused of on several occasions before.
According to an email sent to Rock Paper Shotgun by Take-Two, which contained court filings from both Rockstar and the employees, the GTA maker had a “mole” within the employees’ Discord server who was sending information to the company for over two years.
The top brass at Rockstar had no access to the Discord itself before they decided to let the employees go, as it was, essentially, the only place where worker concerns could be spoken of separately from corporate management. The server itself was set up by workers primarily tied to the IWGB Game Workers union, RPS reports, and had around 340 members by October 2025.
The workers’ lawyers claim that “from at least February 2024, [Rockstar HR director] Charlie Kinloch had been receiving information from a junior employee on trade union activity inside the Server,” and that “over 21 months, at least 26 meetings or communications took place between Mr Kinloch and [the junior employee] concerning the Server, roughly half of them initiated by Mr Kinloch himself.”
This Discord spy had “supplied screenshots and recordings, reported union meetings, training sessions, and union membership numbers, and identified individual union activists” to Rockstar’s management. In early October, Rockstar’s management was informed that the union needed only 12 more members away from achieving the legal threshold for recognition. The union apparently had crossed this threshold by Oct. 18, with Rockstar learning of it on Oct. 20.
Eventually, Rockstar’s VP of information security got login details for the Discord and started downloading data from it, primarily stuff contained in the “announcements” and “general” channels. By the end of October, the layoffs began.
Rockstar counters these claims, as per RPS, with three whistleblowers mentioned in its filings who, apparently, were sending information to management for over two years. Rockstar, however, says it was “in the dark” for the most part, with “occasional glimpses” into the Discord due to apparent security concerns, which Rockstar seems to believe weren’t tight enough. The workers, however, claim otherwise and say that it was an invite-only server with security measures in place to prevent leaks, which, as they claim, never occurred anyway.
The lawsuit is still ongoing, and the information tied to it is, to put it mildly, insurmountably large. We will update this article and provide further coverage as events unfold.
