Over 200 Rockstar employees sign open letter demanding fired colleagues be reinstated

At the end of October, Rockstar Games, the studio behind the Grand Theft Auto series, including the recently delayed Grand Theft Auto 6, fired roughly 30 employees and accused them of misconduct. The company was quickly accused of union-busting after it emerged that every affected employee had been on a Discord server with a union organizer. Now, over 200 Rockstar employees have signed a letter demanding their reinstatement. This also follows protests in London outside the offices of Rockstar and its parent company, Take-Two Interactive. Protests are expected to expand to other cities later this month.

Over 200 Rockstar employees sign a letter demanding that fired employees be reinstated

News about Rockstar Games has been hyper-focused on GTA 6 lately, especially given the recent delay. But employees are not letting this story fall by the wayside. In response to the letter, initially spotted by Eurogamer, an anonymous fired employee said: “It’s heartwarming to see so many of our colleagues supporting us and holding management to account – during a period where Rockstar want us to feel scared, my brave former colleagues are marching straight up to our boss’s door and demanding our voices be heard and not backing down.”

An organizer for the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain, Fred Carter, called the move by Rockstar an “act of union-busting unprecedented in the games industry.” Carter also pointed out that Rockstar’s offices in the UK benefit from the Video Games Tax Relief Program, which, according to Carter, provides the studio “L440m in UK tax relief.” To take this benefit, while simultaneously treating employees this way, displays “a callous and blatant disregard for both the livelihood of workers and the letter of the law,” according to Carter.

One user on the subreddit r/Games had a particularly poignant comment that sums up the sentiment. They wrote: “Man, this kinda […] would’ve been a joke on the radio about some evil corporation in the early GTA games. It’s crazy what incredible success has done to this studio.” GTA is often lauded as a satire of the American way of life, to the point that one of the co-founders of Rockstar recently said that the series is “so closely tied to America […] that [the next game] wouldn’t work the same way elsewhere.” How does a satirical game function when the company that makes it is worthy of the most scathing satire?

It's practically guaranteed that whenever Rockstar decides to launch GTA 6 that it will be the largest video game launch in history. The hype levels are off the charts. It already won the Most Anticipated Game category at the Game Awards once, and with the first delay, it has a strong chance of winning again. Hopefully, the eventual quality of this game is a reminder of the hard-working developers who created it, and not the executives at Rockstar and Take-Two who rake in the cash and drop employees when it's convenient.

Grand Theft Auto VI

November 19, 2026

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