A Court Filing, Not a Trailer, Just Revealed a GTA 6 Online Number
Nobody at Rockstar announced this. It surfaced because a fired employee's lawyer put it in a witness bundle.
An employment tribunal in Glasgow, which opened this week, is hearing the case of 34 former Rockstar North staff dismissed on 30 October 2025 after the company found a private Discord server run by the Independent Workers' Union of Great Britain. Buried in the evidence now before the tribunal: Rockstar staff had discussed a 32-player online format for GTA 6, and the company's own submissions call that number one of its most closely guarded secrets.
What the filing actually says
According to GamesRadar+ and TechRadar, the Discord messages that got employees dismissed weren't leaked footage or screenshots. They were staff complaining about the logistics of running "large sessions" of 32 players during internal testing, plus grumbling about how many people could take leave at once. Ordinary workplace chatter, in other words, except one line named a headcount for an unannounced feature.
Rockstar's legal team described those messages as containing "highly confidential and commercially sensitive information relating to the content and features of an unannounced online service." Dexerto reports that Jennifer Kolbe, Rockstar's Head of Publishing, told the tribunal she found it "extraordinarily alarming" that team members had shared player numbers outside approved channels, comparing the secrecy standard to how Apple guards unreleased hardware.
This is a labour case, not a leak case
It's worth being precise about which lawsuit this is, because GTA 6 has more than one running through the courts right now. This tribunal is 34 sacked Rockstar North employees against their former employer, over whether the firings were legitimate confidentiality enforcement or retaliation for union organising, as the IWGB alleges. It has nothing to do with the CyberLeek leak investigation, where Take-Two is chasing subpoenas against Discord and Microsoft to unmask an anonymous leaker. Different plaintiffs, different courts, different question. The only thing the two cases share is that both keep putting Rockstar's internal Discord habits in front of a judge.
Rockstar has said throughout that the dismissals were about protecting confidential game information, not union activity, and that it regrets being put in a position where it felt dismissals were necessary. The tribunal has already declined to order interim relief for the claimants, ruling it couldn't conclude union membership was the likely principal reason for the firings. None of that resolves the underlying case, which is scheduled to run until 16 October, five weeks before GTA 6 ships.
Why 32 is a real number worth caring about, and why it still isn't final
Here's the part that actually affects how you'll play the game. GTA Online's public sessions cap at 30 players today, per GTA BOOM's breakdown of the filing. If GTA 6 Online lands at 32, that's a small, believable bump rather than the leap to 60 or 100 that speculation has floated for years. It fits a studio that tends to grow systems incrementally rather than reinventing session architecture from scratch.
But read the source carefully. This is testimony about what employees discussed and tested during development in a case about wrongful termination, not a Newswire post or a store listing. Numbers used in internal testing get changed, cut, or scaled before anything ships, and Rockstar's own lawyers were arguing the figure was confidential specifically because it wasn't finalized public information. That's exactly why this carries a Reported badge rather than Confirmed: it tells us what a document says was discussed, not what Rockstar has committed to launch day.
It also doesn't touch the bigger open question we've covered before: whether any online mode ships alongside the single-player campaign on 19 November at all, or arrives later the way GTA Online followed GTA 5 by two weeks in 2013. A player count for a mode that isn't confirmed to exist yet is a data point, not a roadmap. For the full state of what's actually locked in versus still rumour, our everything we know hub tracks it as the picture changes, and the countdown page has the exact time left either way.