The Glasgow employment tribunal is going to run longer than anyone expected. The hearing was due to wrap this Friday, but the judge has granted additional time, and closing arguments will now land on November 17 and 18, just days before GTA VI releases. That means the legal fight over how Rockstar treated 34 dismissed workers will still be live when the game hits shelves.
The mechanics are straightforward. Lawyers for the Independent Workers' Union of Great Britain are finishing their questioning of Rockstar leadership this week. The extra time runs the other direction: Rockstar's own legal team gets more room to cross-examine the fired employees. Julian Benson at Rock Paper Shotgun reported the extension, which was broken on Bluesky by Chris Bratt. Eurogamer carried the same development on October 14, framing the new closing date as almost day and date with the game's launch.
To be clear about what moved and what did not. The schedule changed. The evidence is closed when the closing arguments finish. The ruling does not arrive then, and it does not arrive at any announced date. Both sides will have made their final case, and the judge will still be deciding whether Rockstar broke the law when it fired those staff in late 2025.
The rest of the case is where it was. The tribunal has moved from filings to faces, and the most consequential thing said so far came from the studio's own HR director, who spent two days explaining why October 2025 was the moment to fire 34 people after watching a Discord server for more than two years.
Start with the baseline that has not moved. The Rockstar Games Workers Union, part of the Independent Workers' Union of Great Britain, continues to push for recognition. Thirty-four staff were dismissed in late 2025, 31 in the UK and three in Canada, a move that sparked protests outside Rockstar North in Edinburgh and outside Take-Two's London office. Rockstar says those dismissals followed gross misconduct and the sharing of confidential information, not union activity. The fired workers dispute that squarely, and they are the ones asking the tribunal to rule on it. The hearing opened September 10.
The union's case rests on a mole. According to filings reported by Game Developer and summarized by GamesIndustry.biz, the claimants allege Rockstar had an informant inside the union's Discord server from as early as February 2024, feeding screenshots of union activity back to HR director and co-studio operations manager Charlie Kinloch. They say that mole flagged a sharp rise in recruitment in October 2025, shortly before membership came within about a dozen people of the 10 percent threshold needed for UK statutory recognition. The firings came weeks later.
On October 9, Kinloch was questioned on exactly that timeline, and Kotaku carried the exchange. The lawyer for the fired workers put the gap to him directly: if the posts he had seen in March and June 2025 were not serious enough to investigate then, why did they become urgent in October? Kinloch's answer is the crux of Rockstar's defense. He says nothing about the comments changed. The business did. By October, he told the tribunal, Rockstar was "on the cusp" of a major announcement, media interest was at its peak, and a single internal comment reaching the public "would cause the company damage" and "would paint a picture of the next stages of GTA 6's development." He framed his reviews of the same material as entirely about leak risk, not union status.
The timing he is defending is awkward, and both sides know it. The workers were dismissed at the end of October 2025. Days later, Rockstar announced GTA VI would slip from May 2026 to November 2026. Speculation about a connection between the firings and the delay has followed the case ever since. The claimants' lawyer pressed Kinloch on his own written statement, which called the threat "urgent and serious" and said the company "had to act as quickly as possible," asking whether 18 months counts as quickly. Kinloch's answer was that membership was growing "at an exponential rate," that perhaps half or more of the new joiners could not be identified, and that the brazenness of internal criticism was rising with it.
The mole himself will not be questioned. The informant, referred to in the case as AB, is not among the witnesses the tribunal will hear. Rockstar maintains AB shared information voluntarily. The claimants' lawyer argued before the judge that the company's refusal to let AB testify should support an adverse inference, feeding the union's position that Rockstar paid people with time off in exchange for reporting on colleagues. That argument is on the record. It is not a finding.
One detail reported from the hearing has drawn scrutiny since. A junior employee fed information from the Discord server to Kinloch for more than two and a half years, and that flow of information allegedly surfaced the news that union membership had passed the 10 percent statutory threshold for legal recognition. Less than two weeks later, the workers were fired. In the year since, the union says it has organized the members needed to renew a recognition claim. Rockstar disputes that the sequence means what the union says it means.
What has not changed is the shape of the dispute. Rockstar's stated reason remains a collapse of trust after confidential material was shared, and it again points to past leaks that put unfinished GTA VI footage online. The union's stated reason remains that the company moved to stop recognition. Rockstar says three of the 34 dismissed in Canada were not union members, a detail that matters to a defense against a straight union-busting claim. The fired workers say the Discord they used was siloed and identity-checked, with members kept in separate channels. Rockstar has said at least one journalist was inside one of those channels and that closely guarded material was discussed there. Neither account has been ruled on.
It is worth being precise about what a tribunal hearing is and is not. It is a forum where each side tests the other's evidence under oath. It is not a verdict. Nothing said so far establishes that Rockstar dismissed anyone for organizing, which would be unlawful in the UK if proven, or that the dismissals were ordinary misconduct cases, which would be lawful if proven. Those are the two questions the judge will answer, and the hearing now has another month to run before the arguments are even finished.
None of this touches the confirmed GTA VI record. The release date is November 19, 2026. Rockstar has not linked the dispute to the game's schedule, and no filing or testimony reported so far shows that it moved anything. This is business and labor context, and it belongs in that box.
Two things are true at once. The tribunal is examining whether a company dismissed people for organizing. The company is arguing that its employees shared protected material and that trust collapsed. Everything reported from Glasgow is testimony and allegation, given in open court, with a ruling still to come. The extension does not change that. It just means the closing arguments will be read into the record while the game is in players' hands. When the tribunal issues findings, that is the moment the story changes from claims to conclusions.