Rockstar Faces a Glasgow Tribunal on Thursday

On Thursday 10 September 2026, Rockstar Games appears before an employment tribunal in Glasgow over the dismissal of 31 workers in October 2025. The hearing runs into the middle of October. Grand Theft Auto VI ships on 19 November, which puts the end of the evidence roughly a month before the biggest launch the company has ever attempted. Before anything else: this is a live proceeding and nothing in it has been decided. The claims are contested. Rockstar denies them and says it will defend them. Everything below is either a party's position or a matter of public record about the calendar, and none of it is a finding of fact by anybody. The state of the record, dated REPORTED, from wire copy. AFP filed on Monday 7 September 2026 and the piece we read was carried by BNN Bloomberg, retrieved at 03:05:17 UTC on 8 September 2026, HTTP 200, 152,223 bytes, bylined "September 07, 2026 at 3:50p.m. EDT" under the headline "'Grand Theft Auto VI' makers face employment case in Scotland over sackings". Verbatim: Rockstar Games, the studio behind the highly anticipated video game Grand Theft Auto VI, will appear before an employment tribunal in Glasgow from Thursday over the sacking of 31 workers. And on the calendar, verbatim: The union bringing the case and Rockstar Games' lawyers said Monday the hearing before the Glasgow employment tribunal will run from Sept. 10 to Oct. 16. Note who that sentence attributes the dates to. Not a court register. The parties, jointly, speaking to a wire on Monday. Rockstar's statement, in full, given on 7 September This is a fresh on-record corporate statement, given to AFP the day before we published, and it is the clearest thing Rockstar has said about the case. Verbatim, as reported: A spokesperson for Rockstar Games said it had been 'clear and consistent throughout'.'Individuals across the U.K. and Canada were dismissed for gross misconduct following the sharing of confidential company information, not because of alleged trade union membership or activity,' it said in a statement sent to AFP.'We reject the claims and will defend them vigorously before the tribunal.' Two things in that worth reading slowly. First, the position is a flat denial of the union's central allegation, framed as a conduct matter rather than a union matter. Second, the words "across the U.K. and Canada" put the dismissals in two countries, from the company's own spokesperson. The Glasgow tribunal has jurisdiction over the UK claims only. The union's position, also verbatim The case is brought by the Independent Workers' Union of Great Britain. Its account of the mechanism, as reported in the same wire piece, verbatim: According to the union, Rockstar Games said the employees had been dismissed over messages posted on a private union channel on Discord, in violation of their confidentiality agreements. And on process, verbatim: The IWGB said in a statement that the company denied them 'basic procedural protections by refusing to follow a disciplinary process or provide right of appeal'. One of the dismissed workers, Jason Lewis, is quoted by the union in the same piece. He has put his name to public statements about his own case, which is why we are naming him: None of us imagined that talking to each other about our working conditions would turn our lives upside down and catapult us into the centre of a global media storm... We lost our jobs, our income, our community and the chance to see the game through to release after spending years helping to build it. It was devastating. The ellipsis is in the wire copy as we read it. Background: what already happened in June The IWGB's own statement on its site, retrieved at 03:05:31 UTC on 8 September, HTTP 200, 262,883 bytes, describes a preliminary ruling published in June. Verbatim: At the latest preliminary hearing, Rockstar sought to strike blacklisting claims from the case being brought against it, but the ruling, published yesterday, rejects this attempt to narrow the scope of the case, and confirms that every one of the union's allegations relating to union-busting can proceed to trial. Spring McParlin-Jones, chair of the IWGB Game Workers Branch, in that statement: The tribunal has refused to let Rockstar off the hook, finding that serious factual questions remain about how these workers were identified, listed and dismissed - questions that must now be tested at a full hearing. Read what a strike-out ruling is and is not. A tribunal declining to strike claims out means the claims survive to be heard. It decides nothing about whether they are true. That is the whole content of the June decision, and the union's own wording, "can proceed to trial", is accurate about it. The date discrepancy, which we are not papering over Two sources give two different end dates and we can pin neither. AFP, 7 September 2026: the hearing "will run from Sept. 10 to Oct. 16." The IWGB's own statement, published 17 June 2026: "the trial set to begin on the 10th of September and run to the 15th of October this year", and separately "at the final trial which will run from 10 September to 15 October this year." The start date agrees. The end date differs by one day. The June figure is the union's and the September figure is a wire's account of what the parties said jointly on Monday, so the later one may simply reflect a listing that moved by a day, which is routine. We cannot establish which is right and we are not choosing one silently. Where the end date matters below, we have written "into mid-October" and attributed each figure to its source. What we tried to check ourselves, and what came back NEGATIVE RESULT, and an expected one. The gov.uk employment tribunal decisions database was searched for "Rockstar" at 03:04:30 UTC on 8 September, HTTP 200, 103,690 bytes. It returns three decisions and none of them involves Rockstar Games: a claim against a restaurant company with a similar name, a claim against a public house company with a similar name, and an unrelated matter. Searches for "Take-Two", "Rockstar North" and "Rockstar Games UK" at 03:04:52 UTC returned keyword noise across 92,084, 6,876 and 17,649 decisions respectively, with no match. That proves nothing and we are printing it so nobody misreads it. Gov.uk publishes tribunal judgments, not hearing listings, and a judgment typically appears weeks to months after a hearing concludes. A hearing that opens on Thursday would not be there. Anyone citing an empty search as evidence that no case exists has misunderstood the database. There is therefore no primary UK court document to quote before this hearing ends. Everything published between now and then, this article included, rests on what the parties say. Who the respondent probably is A structural point from the corporate register, offered as context rather than as a finding. The IWGB says its members work across the studio's sites in Edinburgh, Dundee, Lincoln, Leeds and London. On the Companies House register, four of those five site-named companies are not operating entities. Rockstar Lincoln Limited and Rockstar Leeds Limited were both dissolved on 24 March 2026, each by the same voluntary strike-off sequence beginning with a DS01 application on 29 December 2025. Rockstar Dundee Limited is active but non-trading: its statutory accounts to 31 March 2026 report turnover of nil and a loss of £8,100, and its own directors' report says the company "has therefore not actively traded". Rockstar London Limited is active and dormant. The only UK entity filing full trading accounts is Rockstar Games UK Limited, company number 03312220, which was renamed from Rockstar North Limited in December 2021. UNVERIFIED: we have not seen the tribunal's case papers and cannot confirm the respondent entity. The inference that UK staff sit under 03312220 follows from the register, and it is an inference. What is confirmed is the register itself. One hedge that matters here, because the filings invite a wrong reading. Dissolving a dormant subsidiary is a routine tidy-up and is not a studio closure. The Dundee business, employees and assets were transferred into the wider group in January 2021 according to the company's own accounts. Nobody should read "Rockstar Lincoln Limited dissolved" as "Rockstar closed its Lincoln studio" on this evidence. NEGATIVE: no Rockstar entity has filed anything at Companies House since 19 August 2026. The FY2026 accounts for Rockstar Games UK Limited, the set covering the year to 31 March 2026, have not been filed and are not due until roughly the end of December, which is after the game ships. What is and is not established REPORTED, from AFP via BNN Bloomberg on 7 September 2026: the final hearing opens before the Glasgow employment tribunal on Thursday 10 September 2026 and runs into mid-October, over the dismissal of 31 workers in October 2025. CONFIRMED as a fresh on-record statement: Rockstar told AFP on 7 September that 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", and that it rejects the claims and will defend them vigorously. The union's allegations are allegations. Nothing has been proven. The June ruling refused a strike-out application and let the claims proceed, which decided none of them. UNRESOLVED: the end date. AFP says 16 October, attributing the dates to the parties. The IWGB's June statement says 15 October. We have not pinned it against a court register and we are not preferring one. EXPECTED NEGATIVE: gov.uk returns no Rockstar Games decision, because it publishes judgments rather than listings. This is not evidence about the case. CONFIRMED from the corporate register, offered as background: Rockstar Lincoln Limited and Rockstar Leeds Limited were dissolved on 24 March 2026, Rockstar Dundee Limited and Rockstar London Limited are non-trading or dormant, and Rockstar Games UK Limited is the only UK entity filing full trading accounts. UNVERIFIED: that it is the respondent in Glasgow. Explicitly not claimed: that the timing relative to the 19 November launch means anything. Tribunal listings are set by the tribunal, months in advance, and this one was public in June. Method limits printed as limits: there is no primary UK court document to quote before this hearing concludes, and our account of the hearing dates comes from the parties by way of a wire rather than from a listing we read. We covered the run-up to this case in our earlier report on what the dismissed workers asked players to do, and the corporate calendar around it in our piece on the 17 September shareholder vote. The rest of today's reporting is on the news desk, and the GTA 6 wiki holds the running ledger.