GTA 6 legal battle has revealed a ‘top secret’ multiplayer detail

Rockstar has revealed one of the GTA 6 secrets it supposedly sacked dozens of employees for, and it’s to do with GTA Online 2.

While most of the world is praying that GTA 6 isn’t delayed a third time, and makes it out this year, Rockstar Games is in the midst of a legal battle after it fired over 30 employees in November.

The Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IWGB) has taken Rockstar to court over allegations of union busting, but the studio claims that the affected employees were guilty of leaking information about GTA 6 over Discord.

This has always seemed odd, as very little has ever leaked out about the game, but in a recent court hearing Rockstar was forced to share employee messages concerning GTA 6’s multiplayer.

Although not officially announced yet, GTA 6 is obviously going to have multiplayer, since GTA 5’s multiplayer mode, GTA Online, is the main reason the game has been so successful for more than a decade.

Previous rumours have claimed GTA Online 2 is in development and that it will allow for user generated content, à la Fortnite and Roblox. But it’s Rockstar themselves that have revealed that GTA 6’s multiplayer will support up to 32 players in a single lobby.

This isn’t a huge improvement over GTA 5’s multiplayer, which allows for 30 players in a lobby, plus up to two spectators… at least on current hardware (the original PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions only allowed for 16 players).

The news comes via YouTube channel People Make Games (PMG), which has been closely monitoring Rockstar and the IWGB’s legal battle. According to PMG, in the court hearing, Rockstar shared multiple messages from the fired employees that were sent in a Discord server as proof of the gross misconduct that warranted their dismissal from the studio.

During a discussion about organising time off from work, with Rockstar apparently not wanting more than five people off at once, one employee who was among those fired wrote, ‘They mentioned the large session we did today ‘being difficult to do’ but that was 32 players, not sure how that was difficult.’

Another employee, who was also later fired, said, ‘Sounds like you have multiple studios of QA testers, surely someone can manage to organise a 32 player session and let people have their time off.’

Apparently, Rockstar’s own barrister deemed these messages too sensitive to be read out loud (going so far as to call them ‘top secret’) to the court since they’re in relation to an unannounced feature and asked the judge to read them in private.

However, as you can tell by the fact you’re reading all this, Rockstar never applied for any reporting restrictions on this evidence, which is why PMG was able to review it and publicly share it. Also, there’s nothing remoting surprising or unusual about GTA 6 having 32 player lobbies.

You have to question whether Rockstar was really that concerned about this info getting out if this is the case. It’s also entirely possible that things could change during GTA 6’s development and the maximum number of players in a single lobby could be lower or higher when the game’s released.

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Regardless, Rockstar has emphasised its zero tolerance towards leaks of any kind, saying it was ‘gravely concerned to discover some of the Claimants had been sharing highly confidential and commercially sensitive information relating to the content and features of an unannounced online service.

‘They discussed the specific number of online players planned for this service – a material feature of this new title – which has not yet been revealed by Rockstar.’

The fact that Rockstar also deliberately avoids saying it’s for GTA 6 shows how seriously it takes this sort of thing and even mentioning something as relatively minor as planned player numbers for online lobbies can get you in serious trouble.

One employee was fired over a single Discord message that read, ‘Nothing that I’ve heard in North QA! Will keep you updated if that changes ofc.’

Doesn’t sound like much of anything, but Rockstar’s head of publishing, Jennifer Kolbe, argued this information about ‘working patterns’ could ‘indicate the stage of development that GTA 6 was at for those familiar with the games industry and could also undermine team collaboration.’

Whether Rockstar is using this as an excuse to go union busting or not it’s not clear what the employees thought they were doing discussing anything to do with the game in a Discord channel with non-employees in it. If it’s proven that is what was going on, then the court case is unlikely to go their way.

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