Gaming · Wednesday, 16 September 2026

01 Briefing what happened

A colleague told Rockstar the union was 12 members short. Twelve days after it crossed the line, 34 people were fired.

Opening papers at the Glasgow tribunal say Rockstar's HR manager had been getting reports from inside the union's private chat since February 2024.

21 months

that a junior colleague reported the union's private chat to Rockstar's HR manager, the fired workers say

At least 26 meetings or messages, about half of them started by the manager [1][2]

members the union was short of the 10% of staff that forces a UK company to bargain, on 7 October 2025

It crossed the line on 18 October, and 34 people were fired on 30 October [1]

Rockstar staff dismissed in one morning, 31 in the UK and three in Canada

The hearing runs to 16 October, a month before Grand Theft Auto 6 goes on sale [5][9]

63%

more that European game studios spent on freelancers and contractors in 2025 than a year earlier

The number of freelancers working with them rose 24% over the same year [12]

The lead story — what happened

A hearing at the Glasgow Employment Tribunal is deciding why Rockstar Games, the studio behind Grand Theft Auto, fired 34 staff on one morning last October. [5][9]
Thirty-one worked in the UK and belonged to the IWGB, a small British union that organises game workers; three were in Canada. [5][9]
Rachel Crawford, one of those dismissed, told a rally outside the tribunal that she was fired without warning and without a clear answer about what she had done. [6]
Both sides filed their opening papers this week, and Rockstar's owner Take-Two sent them to the games trade press. [2][1]
The fired workers say Rockstar's HR manager, Charlie Kinloch, had been getting reports from inside their private union Discord from at least February 2024. [1][2]
They say at least 26 meetings or messages about that chat took place over 21 months, about half of them started by Kinloch himself. [1][2]
The person passing the information is named in the papers only by a document number. The workers call them a mole; Rockstar calls them a whistleblower. [1][2]
On 7 October 2025 that person told Kinloch the union was 12 members short of 10% of staff, the point at which UK law forces a company to bargain. [1]
The union announced on the server on 18 October that it had crossed the line, and Kinloch was told on 20 October. [1][2]
Rockstar's vice president of information security, Abid Ansari, got into the chat on 24 October and copied two of its channels. [2][1]
Managers were handed lists of people to remove on the evening of 29 October, and the dismissals began the next morning. [2]
Rockstar says the 34 were dismissed for gross misconduct after sharing confidential company information, not for belonging to a union. [7][9]
Its filing says staff discussed a confidential 32-player online mode and other secrets in a room holding about 350 people, 26 of whom were not employees. [1][3]
The same filing lists insults posted in that room, including managers called arseholes and narcissistic, and says any of the 350 could have screenshotted them. [8]
It told the tribunal it guards Grand Theft Auto the way Apple guards the iPhone, keeps five full-time leak investigators and put privacy film on its windows after drones photographed inside. [4][3]
Rockstar's lawyers say waiting until the union had already reached 10% and then sacking 31 members inside 48 hours would have been, in their word, insanity. [3]

Who is involved

Rockstar Games

the studio behind Grand Theft Auto, owned by the New York publisher Take-Two; it fired the 34 and says they leaked company secrets
The IWGB

the Independent Workers' Union of Great Britain, a small union that organises game workers; it is bringing the claim
Charlie Kinloch

Rockstar's HR manager and co-studio operations director; the fired workers say a junior colleague fed him reports from inside the union's chat
Abid Ansari

Rockstar's vice president of information security; the papers say he got into the union's Discord on 24 October and copied two of its channels
Jason Lewis

one of the dismissed developers and an IWGB member; he says a year of speculation about what happened is finally going on the record

How it unfolded

2022 Rockstar staff set up a private Discord chat to organise a union
Feb 2024 a junior employee starts reporting on it to Rockstar's HR manager, the fired workers say
7 Oct 2025 the HR manager is told the union is 12 members short of 10% of staff
18 Oct 2025 the union announces on the chat that it has crossed 10%
30 Oct 2025 34 people are handed pre-written dismissal letters and escorted out
10 Sep 2026 the hearing opens in Glasgow and runs until 16 October

Where this points

The hearing runs to 16 October, and the test is whether the tribunal finds Rockstar fired the 34 for what they posted or for how close the union had come to recognition.

What is pushing on the whole day

The bar and the word are our reading of how hard each one is pushing today. The arrow is where it is heading. The evidence is in the stories below.

Employers reading what staff write Building↑

Rockstar's fired staff say a colleague reported their private union chat to an HR manager for 21 months. [1] Bulkhead's chief executive says his studio checks job applicants' social accounts before hiring them. [10]

Big owners cutting jobs High→

Xbox's cuts this year will reach 3,200 workers. [22] Sony cut at least 292 staff at Bungie in June, most of them from the Destiny team. [13]

Release dates moving back Steady↑

IO Interactive pushed 007 First Light on Switch 2 from this autumn to March 2027. [21] Bungie moved a Marathon update from 22 September to 8 December. [13] Fable, begun in 2017, is now due in February 2027. [22]

Small studios finding backers Easing↑

Bohemia Interactive bought a minority stake in the Polish studio Enjoy, whose game Everwind has sold more than 300,000 copies. [18] Curve Games signed Wayfinder Studios to publish its role-playing game Wyldheart. [19]

The rest of the day

17 more stories on this beat.

Each with its own sources. None of these is a link to the story above.

02
Wardogs boss screens out crunch critics

Joe Brammer, who runs the British studio Bulkhead, said his company checks job applicants' social accounts and rarely hires people who post against crunch. [10] Crunch is the games industry's word for the months of long hours studios work before a deadline. [10] Brammer said the last three months on Wardogs had mattered more to staff than their family lives, and that chosen employees get bonuses and company shares for it. [11] Wardogs has sold two million copies since it went into early access on 10 September. [10]

Why it matters — It puts a price on speaking about working conditions: a developer who has argued in public for shorter hours is told that argument was read before the interview. [10] That is the question the Rockstar hearing is about, in a workplace where nobody has been fired yet.
03
European studios rent more of their staff

European game studios spent 63% more on freelancers and contractors in 2025 than in 2024, against 55% growth worldwide. [12] The figures come from a survey by Tanja Loktionova, who runs the jobs site InGame Job and the consultancy Values Value. [12] The number of freelancers working with European studios rose 24%, and average freelancer income rose 19% globally. [12] Three in ten people surveyed had been laid off in the past year, and finding the next job took about six months. [12]

Why it matters — Loktionova describes studios settling into two tiers: a small core of directors and lead designers who get equity, health cover and bonuses, and a periphery hired for one phase and let go when it ends. [12] The second group carries the whole cost of a bad year.
04
Bungie rebuilds Marathon after the cuts

Bungie, the Sony-owned studio behind Destiny, is rewriting the plan for Marathon, the shooter it launched in March. [13] An update due on 22 September has been pushed to 8 December and will add Symbiosis, the game's first permanent mode you can play without other players hunting you. [13] Bungie is also dropping its fixed seasonal release schedule. [13] It said players had told it the game needed more depth, more variety and better reasons to keep playing. [13] Sony cut at least 292 Bungie staff in June. [13]

Why it matters — Marathon is what Bungie's remaining staff are building on, and it is being redesigned after launch rather than before it. [13] A studio that has already cut its other team has nowhere to move people if this does not work.
05
Valve calls a small game adult, then reverses

Valve, which runs the Steam store, classified the vampire role-playing game Nighthawks as Adults Only days before its 22 September release. [14] The label pulled it out of Steam's default search results and delisted it entirely in countries including Germany. [14] Its writer Richard Cobbett said the game's nudity amounts to a few censored shots inside companion romances. [14] Publisher Wadjet Eye Games said so publicly, and Valve removed the label without ever saying what had triggered it. [15]

Why it matters — Steam decides whether a small PC game is found at all, and its ratings arrive with no explanation and no written appeal. [15] What fixed this one was publicity, which a developer with an audience has and a developer without one does not.
06
Fable kept its funding for ten years

Playground Games has been building a new Fable since 2017, a year after Microsoft closed Lionhead, the studio that made the original games. [22] It is now due on 23 February 2027. [22] Over the same decade Xbox bought Bethesda for $7.5bn and Activision Blizzard for $68.7bn, then cut thousands of jobs and cast off Double Fine, Ninja Theory, Undead Labs and Compulsion Games this summer. [22] Director Ralph Fulton told The Guardian that Fable survived because people inside Xbox see it as vital to the platform. [22][23]

Why it matters — This year's Xbox cuts will reach 3,200 people, and Fable shows what a protected project looks like inside the same company. [22] Being judged core to the platform is what bought this team a decade of funding.
07
Warcraft 3 loses offline play

Blizzard released The Forsaken Kingdom at BlizzCon, a 30-hour story campaign for Warcraft 3: Reforged, 23 years after the game's last expansion. [17] The same update made Reforged always-online and removed local network play, so the game now needs an internet connection even for people who never buy the new campaign. [16] Warcraft senior manager Brad Chan said the change came out of rebuilding the game's servers for worldwide matchmaking. [16] He said the vast majority of players were not using local play. [16]

Why it matters — The game went on sale in 2020 and what you can do with it changed this weekend, through an update nobody chose separately. [16] The one figure in the argument, how many people played offline, is a figure only Blizzard can see. [16]
08
Miami Beach votes through GTA 6 adverts

The City of Miami Beach voted 4-3 to open negotiations with Rockstar Games over advertising for Grand Theft Auto 6, which is set in a version of the city. [30] One commissioner put the price at $3m and another said the city would end up nearer $4m. [30] The adverts would run on beach chairs and umbrellas from 15 October, showing the numerals VI or the words Vice City rather than the game's name. [30] One commissioner played footage of a police chase and said he did not want the city's name beside it. [30]

Why it matters — A city is being paid to carry advertising for a game about crime set in a version of itself, and three of its seven commissioners would not vote for it. [30] What one November launch is worth to Miami Beach is between $3m and $4m.
09
The PlayStation boycott moved nothing

Players organised a week-long boycott of PlayStation in late August over Sony's decision to stop making discs for new games from January 2028. [25] They were asked not to play, not to buy and not to renew subscriptions. [25] Matt Piscatella, an analyst at the research firm Circana, said Sony saw no significant change in player counts or platform use that week. [25] He published no figures. [25] The week overlapped with the Grand Theft Auto 6 gameplay reveal and a Call of Duty beta. [25]

Why it matters — The whole case for the boycott was that players could make a number move. [25] The only people who can see that number work for Sony or sell data about it, so the people taking part had no way to check. [25]
10
007 First Light slips again on Switch 2

IO Interactive has delayed the Nintendo Switch 2 version of 007 First Light to March 2027. [21] The James Bond game was meant to arrive on every machine at once in May 2026, was moved to this autumn, and has now moved again. [21] The studio said the extra time goes on the Switch 2 version's performance and gave no other reason. [21] The game has sold four million copies in three months elsewhere, and IO cut staff this year after Microsoft pulled funding for a separate fantasy project. [21]

Why it matters — Switch 2 owners have now waited ten months past the original date for a game everyone else has finished. [21] IGN asked whether the delay is about the console's smaller userbase or about staying clear of Grand Theft Auto 6, and IO has not said. [21]
11
Marvel's Wolverine goes on sale

Sony released Marvel's Wolverine worldwide on 15 September, only on PlayStation 5. [26] It is made by Insomniac Games, the Sony studio behind the Spider-Man games, together with Marvel Games. [26] Hermen Hulst, who runs Sony's studio business, called it a milestone for PlayStation Studios in the company's own announcement. [26] No sales figures have been published yet. [26]

Why it matters — Sony has landed its biggest autumn release two months before Grand Theft Auto 6 goes on sale on 19 November. [26][5]
12
Bohemia buys into a Polish studio

Bohemia Interactive, the Czech studio behind the Arma military games, has bought a minority stake in Enjoy Studio in Poland. [18] Enjoy makes Everwind, a survival role-playing game that has sold more than 300,000 copies in six months of early access, with Bohemia as its publisher. [18] The two have worked together since Enjoy joined Bohemia's incubator programme in 2024. [18] The price was not disclosed, and Bohemia says this is its first investment in a Polish games company. [18]

Why it matters — This is money going into a small studio rather than out of one. [18] A minority stake leaves Enjoy's founders in charge and gives Bohemia a claim on whatever they build next.
13
Curve signs Wayfinder's Wyldheart

Curve Games will publish Wyldheart, an online co-operative role-playing game from Wayfinder Studios, a team founded by former developers from DICE, the Swedish studio behind Battlefield. [19] Wayfinder says Curve understood quickly what it was trying to make and who for. [19] The studio has described the plan as persistent shared worlds on private servers, so a group of friends plays together instead of thousands of strangers on one shard. [19] No terms were given. [19]

Why it matters — A publishing deal is how a new studio covers wages before its game earns anything. [19] Wayfinder's founders say the big-budget audiences they used to build for want the familiar rather than something new. [19]
14
Gears of War goes day one into Game Pass

Microsoft has listed Gears of War: E-Day for Xbox Game Pass on 6 October, the day it goes on sale. [27] Minecraft Dungeons 2 does the same on 29 September, and the survival game Dune: Awakening joins on 22 September. [27] Day one on Game Pass means a subscriber pays nothing extra for a brand-new game, so the publisher takes the monthly subscription instead of the sale. [27] Both day-one games are limited to the PC and Ultimate tiers. [27]

Why it matters — Xbox is putting one of its own biggest series into the subscription on release day rather than selling it. [27] That trades a large first-week sales number for income that arrives every month and never spikes.
15
Polyphony hiring points at Gran Turismo 8

Polyphony Digital, the Sony studio that makes the Gran Turismo racing games, has posted adverts for build engineers, online engineers and racing game programmers. [24] The listings do not name a project, and Polyphony has only ever worked on Gran Turismo. [24] The last main game, Gran Turismo 7, came out in 2022 and still had more than two million active players in December 2025, according to series creator Kazunori Yamauchi. [24] The studio is also adding twelve cars and two circuits to that game. [24]

Why it matters — A studio staffing up for online and build work is starting a project, not finishing one. [24] For players it means the next Gran Turismo is years away rather than months.
16
Harada's new studio takes on Tekken staff

Katsuhiro Harada, who led Bandai Namco's Tekken fighting games for decades, left this year to start VS Studio, a company owned by the Japanese publisher SNK. [28] Former Tekken 8 director Kohei Ikeda and other Tekken staff have since joined him. [28] Harada told VideoGamesChronicle that the first game has not been announced and will be a surprise, but not something outside what fans expect. [28] He said the colleagues who followed him did so voluntarily. [28]

Why it matters — A senior designer taking his team to a new owner is how a genre changes hands, and SNK is paying for the move. [28] Whatever VS Studio ships will compete with the series Harada spent his career building.
17
World of Warcraft: Forever gets a date

Blizzard will launch World of Warcraft: Forever on 4 November, a version of the game set in an alternate history of its own world. [29] Lead Classic designer Tim Jones told Kotaku the team is starting from a baseline of simplicity closer to the original 2004 game. [29] That rules out Season of Discovery, an earlier version that let character classes take roles they normally could not. [29] Every raid will have a ten-player and a twenty-player option. [29]

Why it matters — Blizzard is now running several versions of the same game at once. [29] The design choices here decide which of them a subscriber actually plays.
18
Sakurai ends the award he founded

Masahiro Sakurai, who created Kirby and Super Smash Bros., has ended the Game Designers Award he set up at the Japan Game Awards in 2010. [20] He said at this year's ceremony that he is stopping because he could not find anyone to replace him, and that the award needs a director who has made games that changed how games are played. [20] Its last winner is Word Game, a text puzzle from the independent studio Team9. [20]

Why it matters — The award existed to point at new ideas rather than sales. [20] It stops because it rested on one person and nobody took it on.

02 Lesson why it matters

The rule said ten per cent. Only Rockstar could see the running total.

Rockstar's HR manager was told on 7 October that the union was twelve members short of the line that forces a company to bargain.

The twist

A union needs ten per cent of staff signed up before a UK company must bargain with it. The fired workers say Rockstar was being told that count as it rose, so the company knew the deadline before they reached it.

How it works

UK law makes a company bargain once 10% of staff join a union
So the only number that matters is how many have signed up
That number lives in the workers' own private chat
Someone inside passes the running count to the company
The company acts in the days after the count is reached

The same force, elsewhere today

Where this chain is also running, in today's other stories.

Warcraft 3 loses offline play

Blizzard removed local play because, it said, the vast majority of players were not using it, and that count is one only Blizzard can see
The PlayStation boycott moved nothing

an analyst reported that Sony's player numbers did not move during the protest week, and the people taking part had no way to check the number their whole plan rested on
Wardogs boss screens out crunch critics

Bulkhead reads what applicants have posted about long hours and turns them away before the interview, acting on a record the applicant did not know was being read

Where you've seen this

Airline seats

the airline sees how many are left and how fast they are going, and the passenger sees only the price rising

Exam grade boundaries

the exam board reads every mark in the country before it sets the pass line, and each student sees only their own

Selling a house

the estate agent knows how many other offers there really are, and the buyer has to take their word for it

The catch

Seeing the count is not the same as being allowed to act on it, and that is exactly what the Glasgow tribunal will spend five weeks deciding.

And the whole of it

Rockstar's own filing says it could not see two of the three rooms in that chat, and could not identify most of the people in the third. The fired workers could not see twenty-six meetings between their HR manager and a colleague. Both sides were acting on a part of the picture, and the tribunal is now reading the parts neither of them had.

03 Truth what's really going on

What is really going on

The fired workers say Rockstar had someone inside their private union chat for 21 months, and that the sackings began twelve days after the union crossed the 10% of staff that forces a UK company to bargain. [1][2] Rockstar says it fired them for leaking secrets, and that waiting until the union had already got there would have been, in its own word, insanity. [3] A tribunal in Glasgow now has five weeks to decide which account the dates fit. [5]

Why it works on us — Rockstar's filing opens on drones at the windows, phishing attacks and $2bn wiped off its parent company's share price, which puts a reader inside a security story before the question of timing is ever raised. [3][4]

Who gains

Rockstar — The fired workers' filing says that within two weeks of the union crossing 10%, membership had fallen far enough that the threshold would not be reached again soon. [2]
Miami Beach — The city expects $3m to $4m from Rockstar for beach-chair advertising running from 15 October to the end of the year. [30]
Bulkhead — Wardogs sold two million copies in five days, and the studio says the overtime behind it is paid for with bonuses and shares given to selected staff. [10][11]
Freelance specialists in Europe — Average freelancer income rose 19% last year, and nearly 60% of studios said they could not find qualified people. [12]
Wadjet Eye Games — Its founder says the adults-only row put Nighthawks in front of more people than its own marketing had, and the label came off before launch. [15]
Playground Games — Fable kept its funding through three years of Xbox cuts because Xbox treats the series as core to the platform, its director says. [22][23]

Who pays

The 34 fired Rockstar workers — They were called to meetings booked as catch-ups, handed pre-written letters with generic allegations, and escorted out with no chance to answer. [2]
Game workers on European contracts — Three in ten people surveyed were laid off in the past year, and the next job typically took six months to find. [12]
Developers who post against long hours — Bulkhead's chief executive says the studio reads applicants' social accounts and turns away people who write that crunch should never happen. [10][11]
Warcraft 3 players without reliable internet — The update removed local network play from a game sold in 2020, so it cannot be played offline at all any more. [16]
The 292 Bungie staff cut in June — Most were on the Destiny team, and the game they were moved off is now being rebuilt by the people who stayed. [13]
Switch 2 owners waiting for 007 First Light — The version was due in May, then this autumn, and is now set for March 2027. [21]

What nobody knows yet

Open questions from across today’s stories — ours included.

01

Who passed the union's chat to Rockstar, and what they were offered.

Both filings refer to the person only by a document number. The workers call them a mole and Rockstar calls them a whistleblower. [1][2]
02

Whether Rockstar knew the 34 were union members when it fired them.

Rockstar says it did not. The fired workers say the HR manager had been given union membership numbers for 21 months, and nobody outside the tribunal has seen the 26 meeting records. [1][2][4]
03

What set off the Adults Only label on Nighthawks.

Valve removed it without explaining, and the developer said he never found out what triggered it. [14][15]
04

What the Grand Theft Auto adverts are worth to Miami Beach.

One commissioner said $3m and another said closer to $4m, and the negotiation has not finished. [30]
05

Why the Switch 2 version of 007 First Light slipped a second time.

IO Interactive said only that the time goes on performance, and would not answer whether Grand Theft Auto 6's date was a factor. [21]
06

How much of Marathon actually changes in December.

Bungie says a fuller plan comes in a blog later this month, and has described the work only as a first step. [13]
07

What the PlayStation boycott did to Sony's numbers.

The Circana analyst said there was no significant change and published no figures, and Sony has released none. [25]
08

How many people making games in Europe are now freelance rather than employed.

The survey reports spending growth and freelancer growth rates, not a headcount. [12]

04 Hope carry this

Valve has taken the adults-only label off Nighthawks, and the vampire game is back in Steam's search results before it goes on sale on 22 September.

Also true today

Word Game, made by the independent studio Team9, won the Game Designers Award at the Japan Game Awards by an overwhelming majority of the judges' votes. It was written in Traditional Chinese first and rebuilt in Japanese.
Bohemia Interactive has bought part of Enjoy Studio in Poland, whose first game Everwind has sold more than 300,000 copies in six months of early access.
Curve Games has signed Wayfinder Studios, a team of former Battlefield developers, to publish its role-playing game Wyldheart.