The Most Ironic Grand Theft Auto 6 Leak Just Came From Rockstar

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.

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.

But the circumstances surrounding this leak reveal something far more interesting about Rockstar's current state. A company obsessed with controlling information following the devastating 2022 GTA 6 leak just demonstrated that its approach to employee relations creates bigger leaks than any hacker could. The studio's attempt to justify mass firings by presenting workplace Discord messages as evidence of corporate espionage backfired when those messages turned out to be QA testers discussing how to schedule testing sessions.

For now, we can only wait until November 2026. By then, we'll know whether 32 players represents a minimum, a maximum, or simply a snapshot of where development stood when Rockstar decided to fire roughly three dozen employees.