Rockstar HR Director Questioned Over Discord ‘Mole’ Allegations and Timing of GTA 6 Firings in Glasgow Tribunal

A dispute over allegations of union-busting at Rockstar Games is being heard at an employment tribunal in Glasgow, Scotland. The Grand Theft Auto 6 studio maintains that more than 30 employees were fired last year for gross misconduct, including leaking sensitive information about the game’s development. Fired developers claim the company acted to prevent the UK trade group IWGB from gaining a foothold there.

The latest turn in the proceedings saw Rockstar Lincoln co-studio manager and HR director Charlie Kinloch questioned over one of the more surprising claims: a junior employee who acted as a mole, allegedly spying on union activity in a separate Discord server.

Dueling sets of claims around this part of last fall’s firings were filed last month, and lawyers are now questioning witnesses about what happened. Among them is that someone under the alias “AB” passed screenshots of union activity in the Discord server to Kinloch for over two years, giving studio management a level of insight into what developers said when they believed no one was watching.

Kinloch had access to this information for years, prompting questions about why it took until October 2025 for Rockstar to act. The fired developers contend that information passed to Kinloch showed the group was just 12 members away — 10 percent of the workforce — from the threshold needed to have a recognized union at Rockstar.

Kinloch contends he never had any interest in or knowledge of their union status, and was purely interested in limiting risk from potential leaks. In today’s questioning, a lawyer pressed him on the timing:

These comments, these posts on the Discord, which you knew about from March 2025 and June 2025 respectively, were not urgent concerns… they were not serious allegations, which urgently required further investigation to protect Rockstar’s interests, or you would have investigated them in March and June 2025?

Lawyer at the tribunal

“It’s important for me to articulate the lens through which I viewed it,” Kinloch replied. “In October… this was the point where the business was on the cusp, I later learned, of making a significant announcement about the development of our next project.” He said discussions about working hours and crunch, amid peak media speculation, would have caused damage if they hit a public forum.

The fired developers were fired at the end of October. Just days later, Rockstar Games announced that GTA 6 would be delayed from May 2026 to November 2026. There was immediate speculation about whether there was any connection between the two events and whether development delays related to some developers’ desire to unionize.

The lawyer representing the fired developers pushed Kinloch on timing, citing his investigation report: “Due to the urgent and serious threat to our business… We had to act as quickly as possible.” The lawyer added, “Is 18 months as quickly as possible?”

The situation was rather different at this moment. Because we had seen that the membership of the discord was expanding at an exponential rate. And some, perhaps half or more of the people who were joining the discord at this moment in October were people whose names we could not determine.

Charlie Kinloch, Rockstar HR director

Kinloch said the brazenness of comments disparaging internal processes seemed to increase with membership growth. When a lawyer noted that one developer’s claim of being bullied out due to his ASD and denied work-from-home arrangements constituted an allegation of facility discrimination, Kinloch responded by contrasting it with October.

“Under the broader context of a period of time in Rockstar’s history where there was no forthcoming major announcements… that information becomes somewhat less commercially problematic if it were to hit the public sphere,” he said. He argued that closer to GTA 6’s release, such comments would carry a financial incentive for someone to leak them.

The studio manager went on to discuss how the growing Discord membership — full of names the company didn’t know — led to a rapid increase in risk of damaging proprietary information getting out. There are conflicting claims about the server’s security: fired employees maintain users were kept siloed and identities authenticated before admission to union discussion channels, while Rockstar has claimed at least one journalist was present in one channel.

One key witness to Rockstar’s intent with monitoring remains the secret “mole” referred to as “AB.” While Rockstar maintains AB shared information of its own volition, AB is not among witnesses allowed to be questioned. At one point, the lawyer for fired developers argued with the judge about needing Kinloch or others on the record about AB’s intentions.

The hearing will continue next week, and other management witnesses are likely to testify. GTA 6 is just over a month away from releasing, and fired employees have asked players not to boycott the game but to support their legal battle instead.