Like a large jaw with a preternaturally strong grip on the teeth it contains, Rockstar has let slip another half-detail about its reasons for firing more than 30 people in October, telling IGN that they were let go for revealing details about games that haven’t even been announced yet.
It’s been a very slow roll since the firings were first revealed. Rockstar denied allegations that it fired the employees because they were attempting to form a union at the studio, saying initially that they were let go for “gross misconduct,” which it later elaborated to mean they had been “distributing and discussing confidential information in a public forum.”
That denial didn’t hold water with the fired employees and the Independent Workers’ of Great Britain (IWGB) union, which filed legal action against Rockstar in November. November also saw the matter brought up in UK Parliament, as Edinburgh West MP Christine Jardine asked for a meeting with the relevant government minister “to discuss what steps could be taken to support the workforce?”
The pressure on Rockstar went up significantly yesterday when the matter was raised in Parliament again, this time during Prime Minister’s Questions, leading UK PM Keir Starmer to call it “a deeply concerning case.” Starmer also promised that government ministers would look into the matter, which I have to imagine is a headache Rockstar is not especially interested in having. Somewhat shockingly, the MP who raised the matter, Chris Murray, said that even after a meeting with Rockstar to discuss the situation, he was not “informed on exactly what these 31 people had done to warrant their immediate dismissal.”
Which brings us to today’s statement, containing just a smidgen more information than we had previously, but enough to make it interesting. “Rockstar Games took action against a small group of individuals, across the UK and internationally, who distributed and discussed confidential information (including specific game features from upcoming and unannounced titles) in a public forum, in breach of company policy and their legal obligations,” a Rockstar rep said. “Claims that these dismissals were linked to union membership or activities are entirely false and misleading.”
Rockstar has previously claimed the fired employees were leaking confidential information but I think it was widely assumed that those leaks, which for the record remain unproven, related entirely to Grand Theft Auto 6. The claim that they were also spilling the beans on, I don’t know, a new Midnight Club or Table Tennis 2 could be seen as a much bigger bag of beans: We don’t know when GTA 6 is coming to PC but we do know it’s coming, and we can make some fairly some assumptions about what sort of game it will be.
But something brand new from Rockstar? Yeah, that is interesting—and it may get more interesting for Rockstar watchers in the future if this mess does end up in court, where claims and defenses will have to be proven.
