GTA 6 tribunal: Rockstar HR boss questioned over Discord mole claims

A senior Rockstar Games manager took the stand on October 9 at the employment tribunal in Glasgow where fired GTA 6 developers are accusing the studio of union busting. Kotaku reports that Charlie Kinloch, co-studio manager and HR director at Rockstar Lincoln, was cross-examined about two things: an alleged junior employee "mole" inside a union Discord server, and why Rockstar waited until October 2025 to fire the people involved.

The case so far

Rockstar's position is that it dismissed more than 30 employees last year for gross misconduct, including leaking sensitive information about GTA 6's development. The former staff say the real reason was to keep the IWGB union from getting established at the company. We cover the background in our explainer on the 2025 firings and tribunal.

According to Kotaku, both sides filed competing claims in September about the Discord side of the case. One of them says a person referred to as "AB" sent Kinloch screenshots of union discussions in a separate Discord server for more than two years. That gave management a detailed view of what developers were saying in what they thought was a private space, and some of those comments were later used to justify the dismissals.

The fired developers also say Kinloch received information showing the group was only 12 members short of the threshold for a recognised union, which they put at 10 percent of the workforce. Kinloch's account is different. He says he had no interest in the group's union status and was only trying to limit the risk of leaks.

"Is 18 months as quickly as possible?"

The claimants' lawyer focused on timing. Kinloch had known about some of the Discord comments since March and June 2025, the lawyer said, so why weren't they investigated then? The lawyer also quoted Kinloch's own statement, which said Rockstar "had to act as quickly as possible" because of an urgent threat, and asked whether 18 months met that standard.

Kinloch said his view of the comments changed by October because the company was, as he put it, "on the cusp, I later learned, of making a significant announcement" about its next project. He argued that posts about working hours and crunch became far more damaging at a time when public interest in Rockstar was at its peak. He also said Discord membership was growing "at an exponential rate," that he could not identify perhaps half or more of the new members, and that posts were becoming more brazen as the server grew.

The lawyer then brought up a post by developer Jacob Jones, who wrote that he had been bullied out by a former director and denied work from home despite his ASD. The lawyer described it as a straightforward allegation of disability discrimination. Kinloch accepted that, but said that at a quieter point in the studio's history such a post would have mattered less commercially. Closer to GTA 6's release, he argued, someone holding that information could profit from it: "They could generate clicks from that and they could create a story from that."

Why the timing matters

The announcement Kinloch was referring to seems to be the second GTA 6 delay. The developers were fired at the end of October 2025, and a few days later Rockstar moved the game from May 2026 to November 2026. People started asking right away whether the two events were connected, and whether development pressure had something to do with staff wanting to unionise. Our release date timeline tracks every delay.

Kinloch's testimony is Rockstar's side of events given under questioning, and the tribunal has not decided anything. The mole allegations and the claim about the recognition threshold come from the fired developers' filings and have not been proven. Kotaku's report does not give a date for a decision. For players, the hearing doesn't change GTA 6's November 19 launch, but it is the most detailed public account yet of how Rockstar watched its own staff in the months before the delay.