A UK judge has denied 31 former Rockstar employees’ bid for interim pay as they and their union representation, the Independent Workers of Great Britain (IWGB), fight their dismissal and are accusing Rockstar of union-busting.

If their interim bid pay had been granted, then Rockstar would have been mandated to put the 31 employees back on the payroll while the legal battle between the employees and Rockstar raged on. The ruling to deny the interim pay bid comes from a new report from Bloomberg, which reports that after a two-day tribunal last week, Judge Frances Eccles felt that the IWGB and the fired workers had not successfully met the bar to demonstrate they had a “pretty good chance of success” at convincing the tribunal of Rockstar’s alleged union-busting.

“In all the circumstances, the tribunal was unable to conclude that it appears likely that the tribunal will find that the principal reason for the claimants’ dismissal was their membership of the IWGB,” Eccles wrote in their ruling.

Last year, Rockstar fired 34 employees (31 in the UK and three in Canada) at the end of October 2025, with the news breaking and initial union-busting accusations flying at the beginning of November 2025. Rockstar shot back at the accusations, claiming the workers were fired for leaking confidential information, which Rockstar would later claim included “specific game features from upcoming and unannounced titles.”

The IWGB filed legal claims against Rockstar as the employees asked for reinstatement, while protests began to appear in physical and digital forms, with game developers both within and outside of Rockstar and Take-Two taking to protesting at Rockstar and Take-Two offices and over 200 Rockstar North employees signing an open letter to management calling for the reinstatement of their colleagues.

An anonymous employee claiming to have knowledge of the situation came forward to claim that Rockstar’s accusations are false and that this is a clear case of union-busting on Rockstar’s part, and the issue has since been brought to the UK parliament twice, with UK Prime Minister Kier Starmer speaking on it the second time, calling the accusations “deeply concerning.”

The alleged leaking of confidential information is said to have taken place in a Discord server used by the IWGB and Rockstar employees for the purposes of organizing. Initially, the IWGB claimed that Rockstar was trying to call employees discussing internal Slack policy changes in that Discord server, the ‘leak’ of confidential information. A claim that was corroborated by one of the three employees fired from Rockstar Toronto when Wccftech spoke to them, CWA Canada, and other protestors who demonstrated at the Rockstar Toronto offices in December 2025.

Though Rockstar alleges it was more than just the discussion of Slack policies, today’s ruling from Eccles does seem to clear up a few unanswered questions about the Discord server in question. Eccles’ ruling confirms that the server, which includes 350 members, was, as advertised, used for organizing, but that it also included more than just current Rockstar employees and IWGB staff.

Eccles cites that beyond the three Canadian workers who were not part of the IWGB union, the server did include former Rockstar staff who did not leave the server after having left the company, and it even included one person who Bloomberg describes as someone who “writes articles about the video-game industry.”

When Wccftech asked the fired Rockstar Toronto worker about the server, who spoke to us under anonymity, they claimed that if there were people in the server who were no longer at Rockstar, they had “no idea” of their presence, adding, “everyone I’ve ever spoken to [in that server] was a current employee.”

Eccles’ ruling also points out that there were other organizing members within the server who were not fired, though, in a point against Rockstar, Judge Eccles also noted that some of the employees who were fired were dismissed despite “having posted very little on the Discord server.”

Rockstar, for its part, says, “We regret that we were put in a position where dismissals were necessary, but we stand by our course of action as supported by the outcome of this hearing.” Meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle, the IWGB is “more confident than ever that a full and substantive tribunal will find Rockstar’s calculated attempt to crush a union to be not only unjust but unlawful.“

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