The breach was devastating. The damage? Rockstar reported $5 million - admittedly a huge amount of money, but still dwarfed the kinds of budgets thrown at the company's projects - in direct recovery costs. Take-Two Interactive saw its stock plummet over 6% in early trading. Thousands of staff hours were diverted from development to damage control.
Then came Christmas Eve 2023, when Grand Theft Auto V's complete source code leaked online, which traced back to the same breach. Then, just days before Rockstar's planned official trailer reveal in December 2023, a hacker named "Skenkir" leaked the GTA 6 trailer early, watermarked with "BUY $BTC," forcing Rockstar to scramble its entire marketing rollout.
With that said, context matters with industry leading companies this big. Grand Theft Auto 6 has the potential to draw $7.6 billion in revenue in its first 60 days. Development costs have reportedly exceeded $2 billion, making it the most expensive entertainment product ever created. Take-Two's market capitalization of roughly $45 billion rises and falls with GTA 6's fortunes.
Case in point: when Rockstar announced the second delay from May to November 2026, Take-Two's stock dropped nearly 8% in after-hours trading, erasing approximately $3.75 billion in market value overnight. The GTA franchise has generated over $9.54 billion since GTA 5's 2013 launch. Grand Theft Auto V alone has sold enough copies to rival entire franchises and become the second-highest-selling game in history. When you protect something worth tens of billions of dollars, a zero-tolerance approach to information security is a fiduciary responsibility.
Following the 2022 catastrophe, Rockstar transformed its security posture. The company hired Security Operations Center analysts, Digital Forensics specialists, and Security Engineers specializing in insider threat detection. They patched critical vulnerabilities in Grand Theft Auto Online. Most controversially, they mandated a full return to office starting April 2024.
Now, going back to the recent firings. The fired employees allegedly "distributed and discussed confidential information (including specific game features from upcoming and unannounced titles) in a public forum." The Discord server allegedly contained over 25 non-Rockstar employees, including competitor developers and at least one games journalist - though reports on the veracity of this claim vary.
The company didn't mince words. "Confidentiality is fundamental to everything Rockstar Games does. Global interest in our games is unparalleled. Even the smallest leak of any information relating to our products and practices can cause major commercial and creative damage—as we have seen in the past. This was never about union membership." Rockstar also claims that employees who "posted union-supportive messages, but who did not breach confidentiality policies, were not dismissed."
It suggests the terminations targeted specific behavior, not union activity itself. However, the IWGB has pushed back forcefully against Rockstar's characterization. The conversations, they say, focused on workplace conditions: pay, bonuses, and frustration over Rockstar's decision to remove internal Slack channels where employees discussed hobbies and non-work topics.
People Make Games obtained access to the Discord and reported that the controversial content appeared to be employees sharing internal policy emails about the Slack purge. One fired employee wrote that they "would really like to see the evidence for them being too much of a productivity hit." An anonymous insider account verified by GTA Forums described employees receiving termination letters for "gross misconduct" in meetings lasting less than five minutes, with no opportunity for union representation. Some employees on paternity leave were allegedly fired via two-minute phone calls.
The situation has escalated to the highest levels of the British government. MP Chris Murray, representing the constituency where Rockstar North is headquartered, raised the issue directly with Prime Minister Starmer, who promised a ministerial investigation. Murray revealed that Rockstar attempted to require MPs to sign NDAs before meeting with executives, but the executives refused.
The controversy raises fundamental questions about development in the AAA sector. Since 2022, the studio has faced a major hack, source code exposure, and a trailer leak - but it is important to consider if any of these incidents were at all related to employees themselves posing confidentiality risks, or if they were entirely external.
When Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick explains delays by invoking Rockstar's pursuit of "perfection," part of that perfection involves making sure that GTA 6 reaches storeshelves as intended, and not by piecemeal - but is this worth the livelihoods of the people creating the game in the first place?
In an ideal world, workers could organize freely, and studios could protect their secrets without conflict. In this world, the tension is par for the course when the project in question is worth more than most countries' GDPs.
