Last week, GTA 6 developers Rockstar Games suddenly fired 31 of their UK-based workers as well as three based in Canada – initially on a charge of “gross misconduct”, then for the act of sharing “confidential information on a public forum”. According to the UK’s IWGB Game Workers union, which all the dismissed UK-based employees were members of, the real reason for the firing was to stop the employees unionising. Since the firings, the IWGB has launched legal proceedings to reinstate all affected UK-based employees, while also holding protests in solidarity.
Yesterday, I attended a protest held outside Rockstar North’s offices in Edinburgh – a small but spirited gathering of people chanting slogans like “Say sorry, be nice, stand up for worker’s rights”. There were a few politicians in attendance and some creative GTA-themed signs, including one with five stars alluding to the game’s wanted system, which had two stars filled up in yellow when I first arrived. By the time I left, it had been completely filled in.
It was a lively but peaceful event, with other workers coming and going in and out of Rockstar North’s two office buildings as usual. The picket was on the side of the road, and caught the attention of passing traffic with some honks of solidarity.
The crowd included a few of the 31 people who only last week had been part of the development of GTA 6, before they were suddenly dismissed. I was able to speak to a few of these former Rockstar employees, although some were wary of going on the record due to the ongoing legal proceedings. Others gave prepared speeches to the protestors. I couldn’t find any current Rockstar employees to share their views on the matter, but some did give anonymous statements of solidarity that were read out by IWGB organiser Fred Carter.
One now-fired senior designer on the open world team who did not wish to be named told me that the general sentiment from colleagues still at Rockstar is “everyone’s been shell-shocked as to what’s happened.”
They had worked at the GTA developer for over seven years, but had only become a member of the IWGB just a month ago. “I joined sort of out of fear of what might go wrong, where people’s jobs might be on the line, an employer might have unreasonable work expectations of employees, and I joined the union to have some protection against that because I didn’t feel like that was the sort of thing that I could work through with the employer directly,” the designer told me.
According to Carter, union activity has been steadily building at Rockstar in recent years. It has grown significantly following the company’s mandatory return-to-work policy enforced last year, but in Carter’s view it has also come about “because of these people’s love for each other, the love for their game, their desire to make this a fairer, better workplace. I think that vision and that appeal was really the strongest.”
According to several of the fired employees, it was also just last month that Rockstar’s union membership had achieved the legal minimum required for statutory recognition under UK law.
“We made this clear to people in the Discord server that we had passed this threshold, and what the next steps will be, and that happened in early-to-mid-October,” explained Jordan Garland, a senior production coordinator who had been with Rockstar for 11 and a half years, starting out in QA. “Our tactic was going through the statutory route, which legally has to result in a yes.”
Garland said he had just finished his morning coffee on October 30th when he was called in for a “quick catch-up” in an office meeting with no prior warning. Jack, a programmer who was based at Rockstar Dundee, added they were given “no evidence, no screenshots, nothing we can defend against.”
The anonymous open world designer I spoke to had an even rougher landing. They had heard whispers about layoffs on the 30th, but did not find out they had been fired until the following day, when they discovered they could no longer access the building before being brought into their termination meeting.
“It was a huge shock,” they said. “I wasn’t made aware I was to be entering that meeting. I wasn’t made aware that I had that legal right to representation. I wasn’t made aware of the allegations or evidence or that I could defend myself. And every part of me wanted to finish what I was working on with my colleagues, and it’s been heart wrenching, just on behalf of myself and everyone affected, but also my colleagues who I feel a bit of guilt with having left behind. I want it better for everybody, and that was our point.”
Garland said that while there is fear among colleagues still at Rockstar, there has also been a lot of support, especially from the IWGB, who acted quickly following the dismissals, with additional protests held outside Rockstar parent company Take-Two Interactive’s offices in London. “[The IWGB] have been instrumental at gathering the support, spreading the words and calling people to action on this clearly quite critical issue for the industry,” Garland said.
Under UK law, employers can dismiss employees immediately for gross misconduct, but this still requires following fair procedure, investigation, and offering the employee the chance to respond. Hence, the IWGB’s argument that these firings were unlawful. As Carter commented, “We believe our members have been fired unlawfully without due procedure, so we’re demanding they be immediately reinstated, compensation for lost pay, demanding for clear accountability from the company for their breaches of their own policy. We’re pursuing everything we can for legal action.”
If these mass firings were meant to be, as one protestor called it, “the nuclear option” from Rockstar to quash union activity, there are still, according to Garland, “hundreds” of union members at Rockstar. Carter has claimed that membership has actually surged since the firings. “That’s not always the case, I think it’s an incredibly brave thing, particularly in a company like this where they’ve shown the lengths they will go to rout out the collective power in their workers.”
As the protest began winding down, Carter offered the closing note that “we just want to let the company know that we’re not going to go away. The unions are strong in this workplace, public support is strong outside the workplace, and it’s only getting stronger.”
In the hours following the Edinburgh protest, Take-Two and Rockstar delayed the console release of GTA 6 from May to November next year. During the company’s latest earnings call with investors, company CEO Strauss Zelnick declared that they were “giving the team some additional time to finish the game with the high level of polish players expect and deserve.” The promise of extra polishing time seems unlikely to reassure Rockstar North developers now facing the sudden departure of colleagues, with more details about the firings likely to surface as the IWGB take the fight to the courts.
