GTA 6 Online to Feature 32-Player Lobbies, Court Documents Reveal

New details about Rockstar’s next entry in the GTA series have come to light in a recent lawsuit. Documents from the IWGB’s lawsuit hint at a 32-player lobby in coming to GTA VI Online. This information comes from the People Make Games YouTube channel, which followed the court proceedings and reviewed the official documentation.

Rockstar is currently under investigation for allegedly dismissing employees who were seeking to unionize. The IWGB claims that the company fired employees who were organizing for better working conditions and engaged in union-busting. However, Rockstar denies these claims, stating that the employees were terminated for sharing confidential information.

The situation began with employees requesting time off. Rockstar initially allowed no more than 13 people off at one time, later reducing the limit to 5, in a studio that had 50 employees and was about to reach 60.

Reported Discord messages shared by Rockstar indicated that employees were leaking information about a “top secret” unannounced online service – which most presumed to be GTA VI Online.

Regarding time-off requests, one employee stated:

“Absolutely no idea, they mentioned the large session we did today ‘being difficult to do,’ but that was 32 players. Not sure how that was difficult.”

Another employee followed up:

“Sounds like ‘you have multiple studios of QA testers, surely someone can manage to organize a 32-player session and let people have their time off’…”

Rockstar responded: “The Claimants had been sharing highly confidential and commercially sensitive information relating to the content and features of an unannounced online service. They discussed the specific number of online players planned for this service - a material feature of this new title - which has not yet been revealed by Rockstar.”

Insert: 32-player GTA VI Online lobbies.

However, this case is far from over and will likely continue to get messy.

One employee was fired for sending a 15-word Discord message. The message read:

“Nothing that I’ve heard in North QA! Will keep you updated if that changes, of course.”

To clarify, the witness explained their termination statement:

“…On May 15th, I sent a message to the Discord general channel stating that I hadn’t heard anything about employees being asked to crunch in the North QA department, but that I would keep others updated. However, I never followed up on this message. That was in response to colleagues in other departments being concerned about a rising workload. I would argue this is the only message I ever sent that directly discussed work, and if anything, it seems to me that this would be considered the opposite of disparaging.”

According to Rockstar, this message included information about working patterns in the team and could indicate the stage of development for GTA VI to those familiar with the games industry. Rockstar also claimed it could undermine team collaboration.

The case is ongoing, and with the largest game of all time supposedly releasing this year, there will certainly be a lot of attention on this situation. In other news, GTA VI is said to be “not content complete” yet, as more work remains on story missions and other features.

Let us know in our Discord what you think about a 32-player lobby for GTA VI and the firing of employees at Rockstar.