Four Headcounts, One Case Number: Inside the Glasgow Tribunal

A five-week hearing opened at the Glasgow Tribunal Centre on Thursday 10 September, in which former Rockstar employees say they were unfairly dismissed and unlawfully blacklisted for trade union activity, and Rockstar says they were dismissed for gross misconduct after confidential company information was shared. The case number is 4104294/2025. Nothing in this hearing has been decided. Everything quoted below comes from the parties' own written arguments, which is to say one side's case put by its lawyers, before any of it has been tested in evidence or ruled on. An employment tribunal makes findings only when it issues its judgment, and no judgment exists. Please read the rest of this article with that sentence in front of you. We also need to be honest about a second thing before we start. We have not seen a single one of the underlying documents. Every passage below is a journalist's transcription, and the transcriptions do not all come from the same journalist or the same document. We have attributed each one by name, in the sentence, because on this story that distinction turns out to matter a great deal. The hard logistics, from the union's own press notice CONFIRMED, from the IWGB's press release, dated on its own page "Mon, Sep 7, 2026, 11:43 AM", fetched at 03:31:35 UTC on 11 September 2026, HTTP 200, 265,666 bytes. Verbatim from the section headed "Information for press about the hearing": The hearing will take place at Glasgow Tribunal Centre, 3 Atlantic Quay, 20 York Street, Glasgow, G2 8GT. It will run from 10am to 4pm, Monday to Friday from Thursday 10 September until at least Thursday 15 October, excluding the Bank Holiday on Monday 28 September. The tribunal office contact on the same notice is [email protected], and the case reference is given as Case no.: 4104294/2025. The case is titled with the lead claimant's surname followed by "and Others". We have elided that surname and we are using the case number instead, which is the unique identifier anyway. No claimant is named anywhere in this article, including the two individuals the union itself put forward and the one it quotes at length. The end date contradicts itself inside one document That press notice says "until at least Thursday 15 October". The body text of the same release says something else, twice: During the hearing, which will run until 16 October, the union will allege that workers were unlawfully blacklisted The hearing will run from 10 September until 16 October, concluding just weeks before the launch of Grand Theft Auto VI on 19 November. Four named outlets give 16 October. The Herald, published 2026-09-07 at 18:05:20 UTC: "scheduled to run from September 10 until October 16". AFP via BNN Bloomberg, 2026-09-07 at 19:50:29 UTC: "will run from Sept. 10 to Oct. 16". Deadline News, the Scottish agency, by Ross Chalmers, 2026-09-10 at 06:03:24 UTC: "The hearing will conclude on October 16, just weeks before GTA VI releases on November 19." Game Developer, by Chris Kerr, 2026-09-10 at 13:48:57 UTC: it "commenced today (September 10) and could run until October 16, 2026". We are not picking one. The union's own press notice says the hearing sits from 10am to 4pm, Monday to Friday, "from Thursday 10 September until at least Thursday 15 October", while the same release's body text and four named outlets give 16 October. The words "at least" are the union's and they are doing real work, because tribunal hearings routinely overrun their listing. The correct phrasing is that the hearing is listed to run until mid-October. There is no official listing to check this against, and the reason is structural rather than suspicious. CONFIRMED from gov.uk's own wording, read at 03:30:26 UTC: the employment tribunal register is a database of decisions, describing itself as "Find decisions on employment tribunal cases in England, Wales and Scotland from February 2017 onwards", holding 133,974 decisions. It is structurally incapable of showing a hearing that is running. A keyword search for "Rockstar" returns three decisions and none of them is this case; they concern a restaurant company, a public house company and an unrelated 2025 matter. A search for the case number falls through to the unfiltered set of 15,345. So our earlier observation that there were no tribunal decisions naming Rockstar was never evidence of absence, and we should have said so at the time. Two further official routes are closed. The Court and Tribunal Hearings service states on its own landing page that it covers "Hearings in First Tier and Upper Tribunals (excluding Employment Tribunals)". And HMCTS's own media-access guidance names the real listing source, verbatim: "Employment Tribunal listings for the next two or three weeks are available from Courtserve. Journalists should be told that they can register, free of charge, to access the listings at the above link." We reached courtserve.net at 03:30:56 UTC, HTTP 200, 23,893 bytes, and every listing path behind it returned 404 from behind a sign-in wall across three attempts. We could not read the official listing, so we are telling you that rather than implying we had it. One small thing while we are in the official records. The union's notice calls 28 September a Bank Holiday. gov.uk's statutory list of Scottish bank holidays for 2026, read at 03:32:11 UTC, does not include that date. The complete list is 1 and 2 January, Good Friday on 3 April, 4 May, 25 May, a World Cup holiday on 15 June, 3 August, St Andrew's Day on 30 November, 25 December and 28 December. So: the union's press notice says the tribunal will not sit on Monday 28 September, and gov.uk's statutory list does not carry that date as a bank holiday. We are not going to guess at which local holiday it is. Four different headcounts, and we are printing all four This is the number everybody is getting wrong, us included until this week. 34 believed dismissed. Press Association Scotland, by Danyel VanReenen and Neil Pooran, published 2026-09-10 at 17:01 UTC, verbatim: "Some 34 people are believed to have been dismissed in October last year and 23 are taking part in the employment tribunal." PA also reports the claimants' own opening argument saying "The respondent dismissed 34 of them on a single day without any notice, without hearing from any claimant in their defence, and wholly ignoring the procedural requirements of its own disciplinary procedure." 23 taking part. Same PA copy, same sentence. PA had reporters in the room on day one, and it is the only source we have from someone who was. 31, the union's figure. The IWGB's release says Rockstar "unlawfully fired 31 workers in October last year" and refers to "the mass dismissal of 31 GTA VI workers". Dexerto, 10 September, says "31 former Rockstar employees are challenging their dismissals". 34 including 31 union members and three in Canada. Game Developer, 10 September, verbatim: "34 workers were fired in total, including 31 members of the IWGB union and three people based in Canada who had also been involved in union activity." Those are not four versions of one number. They look like counts of three or four different things: people dismissed, people dismissed who were IWGB members, and people actually before this tribunal. The official case title states no number at all. We could not resolve the spread, because the only instrument that would settle it is the CourtServe listing we could not reach. We are therefore not writing "31 claimants". It is the one figure in this story that a reporter who was in the room contradicts. A UK employment tribunal has jurisdiction over employment in Great Britain, which is the obvious reason three people based in Canada could appear in a dismissal total and not in a Glasgow hearing, but no source states that and we found no evidence of any Canadian proceeding, so treat the explanation as a possibility rather than a fact. Rockstar's statement, which contains no number CONFIRMED, verbatim, via The Herald and Game Developer. A Rockstar Games spokesperson: Rockstar Games' position has been clear and consistent throughout. Individuals across the UK and Canada were dismissed for gross misconduct following the sharing of confidential company information, not because of alleged trade union membership or activity. We reject the claims and will defend them vigorously before the tribunal. Read that against the headcount section above. It gives no figure for anything. It supports the two-jurisdiction structure, the United Kingdom and Canada, which is the mechanism that makes the different counts different. It supports no arithmetic, and nobody should attribute a number to Rockstar on the strength of it. Alan Lewis, head of global corporate communications at Take-Two, also on the record via The Herald: We strive to make the world's best entertainment properties by giving our best-in-class creative teams positive work environments and ongoing career opportunities. Our culture is focused on teamwork, excellence, and kindness. Rockstar Games terminated a small number of individuals for gross misconduct, and for no other reason. As always, we fully support Rockstar's ambitions and approach. And IWGB president Alex Marshall, on the record in the union's own release: We believe Rockstar has tried to get away with Grand Theft Employment Rights. After a year of fighting to get answers, we hope this tribunal will finally back them into a corner and bring the truth to light. As the world gets its first proper look at GTA VI, this hearing will give people a chance to look behind the scenes at what happened to the workers who helped make it. The blackmail line, and why it is not the 2022 breach The Herald's day-one court copy, published 2026-09-10 at 20:02:00 UTC (fetched 03:35:33 UTC, HTTP 200, 291,313 bytes), carries the single most striking line in the record, and almost nobody has picked it up. Rockstar told the tribunal that it is "subject to regular assaults on its security and systems" and is "hypervigilant" about confidentiality, and then, verbatim: Most recently, in the last few weeks, a hacking group attempted to blackmail the respondent (Rockstar). To be completely clear about what that is and is not: "the last few weeks" means the autumn of 2026, not 2022. This is not the September 2022 Rockstar breach, which we have covered separately in our explainer on that hack and in our reporting on the subsequent criminal proceedings. It is a new assertion about a recent event, made by Rockstar in its own written argument, and it is consistent in timing with the clip leaks of August 2026. We searched for independent coverage of it and found effectively nothing but 2022 material, so treat it as an untested assertion by one party and not as an established event. If you see an aggregator merge this with Lapsus$, that is the error. The Herald's copy carries a boilerplate block about a subscriber partnership with a United States sister title. The content is plainly United Kingdom court copy, so we are treating that block as a template artefact and attributing the reporting to The Herald. What Rockstar says about the Discord server All of the following is Rockstar's account of its own conduct, set out in its opening statement. It is the company's case, not a finding, and the claimants dispute it. PA also records an important procedural detail: that opening statement was "'read in' during an earlier stage of the tribunal", so it was not delivered live on day one, and nobody should write that it was. Verbatim, via PA and The Herald: When it accessed Room C in mid-October 2025, the respondent could immediately see that the 300 plus people, including disgruntled ex-employees, competitors and a journalist, were being handed a huge quantity of information by the claimants. At any moment, a screenshot or forwarding of any one of these messages by any one of the 350 users, or the publishing of an article about them by the journalist, could have generated enormously damaging publicity and hit market confidence and the Take-Two share price. The danger of Discord was, specifically, very well known to the claimants. Note that the server population is given three different ways. Rockstar's note says "300 plus people" in one sentence and "350 users" in another. The claimants' note says "approximately 340 participants". All three appear in PA's single article. We are printing all three rather than picking one. The "Room C" passage, and a note on why we have split it One fragment of Rockstar's written argument is double-sourced and solid: it appears in The Herald's day-one copy and in GTA BOOM's write-up, which went up 84 minutes later, with identical wording. The fuller passage as GTA BOOM prints it is single-sourced to GTA BOOM. A disclosure about the quotation itself. The passage contains an en dash, which is the only non-ASCII character in it. This publication does not use that character, and silently replacing a character inside a verbatim quotation is worse than not reproducing it, so we have split the quotation at that point and are giving you the two halves separately. Nothing else has been altered. First half, the double-sourced fragment, verbatim: Other Claimants in Room C were candidly referencing game features Second half, immediately following in the original, verbatim: one of the most closely guarded secrets of the company. Two discussed an online 32 player format which was highly confidential at that time. "Claimants" and "Room C" are capitalised in the original. "32 player" is unhyphenated in the original and we have not tidied it. GTA BOOM also reports that Rockstar Head of Publishing Jennifer Kolbe described seeing team members share details about online player numbers for a confidential project as "extraordinarily alarming". That characterisation is single-sourced to GTA BOOM. And GTA BOOM makes a fair point about escalation, verbatim: "Rockstar's legal team described those messages at the time as 'highly confidential and commercially sensitive information relating to the content and features of an unannounced online service.' The new wording is a step above that language." None of this confirms anything about GTA 6 Online. What it supports is that Rockstar's lawyers called the online player format one of the company's most closely guarded secrets, and that the number 32 was discussed internally in 2025. Dexerto's own hedge is exactly right and we are borrowing it, verbatim: "It only states that a 32-player format was being discussed and was highly confidential at that time." We have traced how that became a reported specification in our earlier piece on the court documents, and the chain is dismantled again in today's companion piece. The security-regime passage is single-sourced, and that source got the city wrong The cluster most widely quoted this week, being five full-time leak investigators, escorted contractors, privacy film on office windows and the comparison to Apple and Coca-Cola, comes from one outlet: Dexerto, by Michael Gwilliam, published 2026-09-10 at 20:47:13 UTC (fetched 03:14:01 UTC, HTTP 200, 319,116 bytes). It says it is drawing on Rockstar's written statement to the tribunal. 6Charts has not seen that document, and no second outlet has published these particular passages. We checked The Herald's full day-one text for them. "32" returns zero hits. "Kolbe" zero. "Apple" zero. "Coke" zero. "formula" zero. "alarming" zero. "privacy film" zero. "drone" zero. "investigator" zero. So when you see these lines presented as things "the tribunal heard", understand that one outlet is carrying them. And there is a reason to be careful with that outlet specifically. Dexerto datelines this hearing to an employment tribunal in Edinburgh. It is in Glasgow. Rockstar's studio is in Edinburgh, which is the likely source of the slip, but it is a checkable detail that a reader could verify in thirty seconds, and it is wrong. We are saying so because we are leaning on the same report for material nobody else has. Dexerto's own wording, which differs from the summaries circulating, verbatim: Guarding the secrets of the unique gameplay and design are akin to Apple protecting the iPhone or Coke protecting its formula. "Are akin" is the filing's grammar as Dexerto renders it and we have not corrected it. Dexerto reports that Rockstar "reportedly employs five full-time investigators and a director to monitor potential leaks", that "Contractors are escorted by security", and that the company "also installed privacy film on its office windows after drones were allegedly used to photograph inside its buildings". The words "reportedly" and "allegedly" there are Dexerto's own hedges and we have kept both. It also describes all visitors signing non-disclosure agreements, photography being forbidden, personal laptops, phones and tablets being blocked from Rockstar systems, external storage devices being banned and remote work being heavily restricted. Dexerto describes the referenced features as belonging to "a confidential project". The claimants' case This is the claimants' case as put by their lawyers. Rockstar denies it and is defending the claims. Verbatim, via PA: At the time of the dismissals, there were approximately 340 participants within the Rockstar Game Workers Union Discord Server The claimants say that the contemporaneous evidence points to a much simpler, realistic and credible explanation: the respondent (Rockstar) struck at the union because it had become capable of exercising collective power. Against Rockstar's characterisation of what was being discussed, the claimants list what they call trivial matters, verbatim: The canteen running out of vegan sausages, coffee being burned, the office running out of Wispa chocolate bars, or checking the social media policy on (Rockstar's) intranet. They also say, verbatim, that "Profanity was routinely used by management and staff at the respondent without disciplinary consequence." PA reports that the claimants' lawyers told the tribunal there had been a "mole" in the union's Discord feeding information to management for more than a year, that the IWGB had reached 10 per cent membership of the workforce, and that employees were summarily dismissed on the morning of 30 October 2025. One procedural point that is easy to overstate. The Herald and the IWGB both report that an earlier interim ruling rejected Rockstar's attempt to have the blacklisting allegations removed from the case, so those claims will be considered at this hearing. That is a refusal of a strike-out application. It is procedural and it is not a finding that anybody blacklisted anybody. The dismissed workers have asked supporters not to boycott Grand Theft Auto VI, which we reported at the time in our piece on their appeal. If boycott talk reaches you attached to this hearing, that is the context it needs. What is and is not established CONFIRMED: a hearing in case 4104294/2025 opened on Thursday 10 September 2026 at the Glasgow Tribunal Centre, 3 Atlantic Quay, 20 York Street, Glasgow G2 8GT, sitting 10am to 4pm Monday to Friday, per the union's press notice and PA's report from the room. PRINTED UNRESOLVED: the end date. The union's own press notice says "until at least Thursday 15 October" while the same release's body text and four named outlets say 16 October. Both strings are in one document. The hearing is listed to run until mid-October and tribunal hearings overrun. PRINTED UNRESOLVED: the headcount. PA reports 34 believed dismissed and 23 taking part; the IWGB says 31 workers; Game Developer says 34 in total including 31 union members and three in Canada. The case title states no number. We do not write "31 claimants". CONFIRMED: Rockstar's statement contains no number at all. It says "Individuals across the UK and Canada" and supports the two-jurisdiction structure, nothing more. REPORTED BY THE HERALD, and untested: Rockstar told the tribunal that "in the last few weeks, a hacking group attempted to blackmail the respondent". That refers to the autumn of 2026 and is not the 2022 breach. DOUBLE-SOURCED: the fragment about claimants "candidly referencing game features" appears in both The Herald and GTA BOOM with identical wording. The quotation contains an en dash, so we have split it and disclosed the split rather than altering it. SINGLE-SOURCED TO GTA BOOM: the "Other Claimants in Room C" framing, the sentence "Two discussed an online 32 player format which was highly confidential at that time", and Jennifer Kolbe's "extraordinarily alarming". SINGLE-SOURCED TO DEXERTO: the Apple and Coke comparison, the five full-time investigators and a director, the escorted contractors, the device bans and the privacy film after alleged drone photography. No second outlet carries them, and Dexerto places this hearing in Edinburgh, which is wrong. Explicitly not claimed: that GTA 6 Online supports 32 players. Rockstar has never announced a player count. GTA 5 Online runs 30 active players plus up to two spectators. Explicitly not claimed: that anybody blacklisted anybody, or that any allegation by either side is true. An interim ruling refusing a strike-out application is procedural, not a finding, and no judgment exists. Method limits printed as limits: we have read none of the underlying documents; CourtServe, the authoritative listing source named in HMCTS's own guidance, sits behind a sign-in wall we could not pass; gov.uk publishes tribunal decisions and not live hearings, so our earlier nil result there was never evidence of absence; the Court and Tribunal Hearings service explicitly excludes employment tribunals; we have no source for the composition of the panel or the name of the judge and have invented neither; and we have no information about whether any reporting restriction is in force in this case. Privacy: no claimant is named, the lead claimant's surname in the case title is elided, and we are using the case number instead. Our record of what Rockstar and Take-Two have actually said on the record, as against what is being read into this hearing, is on the wiki, with the rest of today's reporting on the news desk. The servers list and the leaderboards are there if this is not what you came for.