The most ironic leak in Grand Theft Auto 6 history didn't come from a hacker or a disgruntled employee posting on Reddit. It came from Rockstar's own legal team.
During a Scottish tribunal, employee Discord messages were submitted as evidence, messages that revealed Rockstar is testing GTA 6 Online with 32-player sessions. In other words, information Rockstar once guarded closely is now public thanks to its own legal filings.
The catch? The information itself isn’t groundbreaking. Grand Theft Auto Online has supported 32 players since Rockstar released Grand Theft Auto V for the PlayStation 4 via the Enhanced Edition many years ago. Given how often GTA 6 is described as a generational leap, not just for the series but for gaming as a whole, some fans were expecting that number to be higher this time around.
The revelation comes from the ongoing Glasgow employment tribunal involving 31 fired Rockstar employees. The company dismissed the workers in October 2025, alleging they had shared confidential information in a private Discord server used for union organizing. The case is part of a broader set of legal proceedings unfolding across multiple fronts.
Chris Bratt of People Make Games traveled to Glasgow to review the court documents in person, later publishing his findings on January 13, 2026. During a January 12 hearing, Rockstar’s barrister asked the judge to review certain evidence privately rather than read it aloud, arguing that the material was extremely sensitive. According to counsel, it contained a “top-secret element of GTA 6” they were unwilling to discuss in open court.
The irony is that Rockstar never sought reporting restrictions on the evidence. As a result, anyone could book an appointment at the Glasgow Employment Tribunal and review more than 1,000 pages of documents firsthand - exactly as People Make Games did. While working through that volume of material is hardly trivial, it’s difficult to imagine Rockstar expected the press to simply look the other way.
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The supposedly explosive leak? Two QA testers discussing their workload in October 2025. One employee wrote: "They mentioned the large session we did today 'being difficult to do,' but that was 32 players, not sure how that was difficult." Another fired worker responded: "Sounds like 'you have multiple studios of QA testers, surely someone can manage to organise a 32 player session and let people have their time off.'"
That's it. Two colleagues venting about scheduling difficulties while referencing a player count that has been standard in GTA Online for years. For a game arriving in late 2026, that's not exactly a generational leap. Though it is important to point out at that testing at 32, at this point in development, does not mean shipping with 32.
Case in point: Fortnite drops 100 players into matches. Call of Duty: Warzone handles 150. Even Battlefield 2042 attempted 128-player lobbies before scaling back due to technical issues. By modern multiplayer standards, 32 players is conservative. With that said, what the messages actually indicate is that Rockstar considers even the most mundane workplace discussions about multiplayer testing to be terminable offenses.
Technical limitations could explain a conservative player count, even if it's disappointing. GTA Online uses a hybrid peer-to-peer and server architecture that has struggled with stability for over a decade. According to previous reports, Take-Two Interactive rejected Rockstar's pitch for dedicated servers for GTA 6 Online due to cost concerns.
GTA's complex physics systems demand more synchronization than a typical shooter does exponentially. Each player's action must sync across all clients, and with peer-to-peer networking, one unstable connection can degrade the experience for everyone. Enhanced graphics in GTA 6 leave less computational headroom for processing additional player data.
Of course, whether GTA 6 Online actually launches with 32-player lobbies or eventually scales higher remains uncertain. The Discord messages reference a specific testing session, not a finalized product specification. Rockstar could start conservatively and expand capacity post-launch, or the company might have entirely different plans for different game modes.
Taken together, the circumstances around the leak say more about Rockstar’s current position than about GTA 6 itself. In the wake of the devastating 2022 GTA 6 breach, the studio has become intensely focused on controlling information. Yet this episode shows how its handling of internal disputes can expose more than any external hacker. In attempting to justify mass terminations by submitting workplace Discord messages as evidence, Rockstar instead revealed routine discussions between QA staff about scheduling online testing sessions.
