Developers working on Grand Theft Auto VI were fired after developer Rockstar uncovered a “disparaging” private chat room where employees swore about their managers and complained about the company, a tribunal has been told.

The company said it accessed a private Discord server where hundreds of people “including disgruntled ex-employees, competitors and a journalist” were discussing the upcoming video game with employees.

A group of 23 former Rockstar employees have begun an employment tribunal, claiming they were unfairly dismissed while working on GTA VI.

The group claim they were unfairly dismissed for trade union activities.

They are being represented by the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IWGB).

Rockstar has said it will vigorously contest the tribunal and accused the ex-employees of breaching the company’s confidentiality rules by discussing sensitive information on the Discord server.

Some 34 Rockstar employees were dismissed in October last year after the company accessed the Discord chat room.

Grand Theft Auto VI, the latest instalment in the popular video game series, is due for release on November 19.

Pre-orders of the game are already thought to have been worth hundreds of millions.

On Thursday, the video games workers’ employment tribunal against Rockstar began in Glasgow, with legal discussion taking place during the day.

In Rockstar’s opening note, the company said it was “subject to regular assaults on its security and systems” and was “hypervigilant” about its confidentiality.

The company argued: “Most recently, in the last few weeks, a hacking group attempted to blackmail the respondent (Rockstar)”.

It continued: “The danger of Discord was, specifically, very well known to the claimants”.

Rockstar said they had been alerted to the existence of the Discord room by concerned members of the private server.

The legal argument said: “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.”

It continued: “One of the first things the respondent’s witnesses describe identifying when they gained access to the Discord, was that the hundreds of people in Room C were audience to the claimants openly and vituperatively disparaging and defaming their employer and its parent company, Take-Two.

“A named manager was called a ‘c***’, the company hierarchy were called cowardly ‘corporate f****’, managers were called ‘arseholes’, ‘narcissistic’, ‘abusive’ and ‘bastards’.

“A sequence of HR announcements were mocked as ‘like a shit advent calendar’ and management was told to ‘get f*****’.

“The company was slated as structurally cracking’, ‘sliding downhill into corporate hell’ and having ‘overspent its budget’ with investors said to be ‘losing confidence’.

“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 legal argument alleged that claimants were “candidly referencing game features – one of the most closely guarded secrets of the company” and circulating “many, many pieces of information that explicitly or implicitly referred to the state of development of GTA VI and therefore whether it was on track or behind the publicly announced release schedule.”

The company’s opening statement, which was “read in” during an earlier stage of the tribunal, said the “exceptional value and prestige” of GTA VI partly explains its “extreme protectiveness” towards it.

The company said that Discord has much lower security barriers than the company’s own systems and that the use of Discord was blocked on the company’s IT systems.

It urged the tribunal to consider the “shocking” content of the Discord posts.

Lawyers for the claimants will dispute the suggestion that confidential information was shared and that members of the group were disparaging the company.

In the claimants’ opening arguments, lawyers said the group of former employees had been unfairly dismissed for trade union activities.

The legal argument stated: “At the time of the dismissals, there were approximately 340 participants within the Rockstar Game Workers Union Discord Server…

“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.”

It claimed that the IWGB had achieved 10% of workforce membership and the company wished to deny the possibility of a collective bargaining arrangement.

The claimants’ lawyers said there had been a “mole” within the union’s Discord server, who had been feeding information to management for more than a year.

They said employees were “summarily dismissed” on the morning of October 30, 2025, after having been identified by management.

They disputed that the dismissals were due to misconduct, saying: “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.”

The claimants’ legal argument said many posts on the Discord server held to be “egregious” were in fact “trivial matters”, listing examples: “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 added: “The use of expletives and informal language on the server is not unusual in private union forums.

“Profanity was routinely used by management and staff at the respondent without disciplinary consequence.”