Tribunal Clears Rockstar Union Case for Full Trial

*This article covers an ongoing legal dispute. Claims by both Rockstar Games and the Independent Workers' Union of Great Britain (IWGB) are attributed to their sources. Nothing here asserts wrongdoing that a tribunal has not yet found. The reporting below is reported tier - drawn from press coverage of the proceedings, not from Rockstar or Take-Two official channels.*

On June 19, 2026, a Glasgow employment tribunal rejected Rockstar's attempt to strike out the blacklisting claims brought by dismissed staff, clearing the IWGB's allegations to proceed to a full public trial. According to coverage from The Register, Novara Media and PC Gamer, the tribunal found that serious factual questions remained about how the workers were identified, listed and dismissed - questions it said should be tested at trial rather than dismissed in advance.

The full trial is scheduled for September 10 to October 15, 2026, a window that ends roughly five weeks before the game's November 19 launch.

Three sets of claims were cleared: unfair dismissal, trade-union victimisation, and blacklisting - the last defined under UK law as the unlawful compiling of a discriminatory list of union activists. All three now go to a substantive hearing.

The case stems from the dismissal of 34 employees on October 30-31, 2025 - 31 in the UK (across the Edinburgh, Dundee and Lincoln studios, with London and Leeds staff among the union membership) and 3 in Canada. Per multiple outlets, all 31 UK dismissed workers were IWGB members. These figures are cross-checked across several sources.

Rockstar's position, stated consistently since the dismissals, is that the sackings followed employees "discussing confidential information in a public forum" - described as a Discord server - which it characterised as gross misconduct over leaking confidential information.

The IWGB's counter is that the Discord was private, restricted to union members and organisers, and contained discussion of working conditions, pay transparency and crunch - not game secrets - and that the dismissals amounted to union-busting. Following the ruling, one dismissed worker, Ellie Dunstan, was quoted saying, "After months of fighting to have our voices heard, this is a moment to celebrate." Rockstar has not linked the dispute to the game's development timeline, and no tribunal finding on the merits has yet been made.

Because the trial runs through October 2026, the dispute is set to remain in headlines across the final pre-launch stretch, overlapping the pre-order period and the marketing ramp. The controversy runs parallel to a separate move by staff to organise formally - see the coverage of the Rockstar Game Workers Union launch. The two threads are related but distinct: one is the tribunal over the 2025 dismissals, the other a bid for union recognition going forward.