Rockstar Workers Form UK Union After 31 Staff Fired Over Discord Leaks

Rockstar Games staff in the UK have formed a union, the Rockstar Game Workers Union (RGWU), operating as a branch of the Independent Workers' Union of Great Britain (IWGB). The move follows the dismissal of 31 employees on October 30, 2025 — sackings the new union says were retaliation for organising, and which Rockstar and parent Take-Two Interactive say were over the sharing of confidential information in a Discord channel.

That is the core of it. Everything else is contested, and the contest is heading to an employment tribunal.

The union's position, as relayed through IWGB statements and picked up across UK trade press, is that workers were discussing labour conditions — crunch hours, pay, flexible working — in a private Discord when management moved in. Former employee Chris Murray put it bluntly in a personal account that's been circulating this week: "Rockstar Games fired me over alleged leaks — I just wanted to join a union." The IWGB says some of the fired staff were on skilled worker visas tied to Rockstar sponsorship, meaning the dismissals didn't just end their jobs but their right to remain in the country.

That detail has pulled the story out of the games press and into Westminster. Labour MP Keir Starmer — yes, the Prime Minister, whose constituency includes some of the affected workers — has weighed in publicly, saying "my constituents have lost their jobs and income, and one person was forced to leave the country after their visa sponsorship was cancelled," and reiterating that "all workers have the right to join a union." When the sitting PM is name-checking your HR decisions, the story has stopped being a niche industry dispute.

Rockstar's public line, via CEO Strauss Zelnick, remains that the studio "doesn't participate in crunch" and is "first and foremost" focused on quality. The union's counter is that crunch hours were still being logged into early 2026, which is the kind of direct contradiction that tribunals tend to find interesting. Take-Two has otherwise stuck to the confidential-information framing and declined to engage with the labour angle.

What's confirmed: the union exists, the dismissals happened on October 30, 2025, and tribunal proceedings are in motion. What's still emerging: the specifics of what was actually shared in that Discord, whether Rockstar formally notified the Home Office about the visa holders (the IWGB alleges it did), and how many more current employees are quietly signed up.

The timing is the part nobody at Take-Two's investor relations desk wants to discuss. Grand Theft Auto 6 is scheduled for November 19, 2026 — roughly a year out from a tribunal calendar that could drag well into the marketing cycle for the most expensive entertainment product ever made. As we've seen with the ZeniMax organising drive and the long Activision Blizzard saga, AAA unionisation tends to accelerate, not stall, once the first wave of dismissals hits the press.

Open angles the community is tracking: whether the tribunal forces disclosure of internal communications about working hours; whether Take-Two's confidential-information defence holds up when the alleged confidential material is, per the union, conversations about pay; whether any of this touches the GTA 6 release date; and whether other Rockstar offices — the ones not covered by UK employment law — follow suit.

A studio that says it doesn't crunch, defending itself against a union it says doesn't need to exist, over leaks from a chat about a problem that isn't happening. The shape of this one is going to look very familiar to anyone who watched the last decade of games industry labour disputes play out.