GTA 6 Online's 32-Player Format Resurfaces in Court Filing
Nobody at Rockstar announced this. It surfaced, for the second time this year, in Rockstar's own tribunal paperwork.
An employment tribunal in Glasgow is hearing the case of former Rockstar North staff, among 34 dismissed on 30 October 2025 after the company found a private Discord server run by the Independent Workers' Union of Great Britain. A filing reported this week repeats a detail first reported in January: Rockstar staff had discussed a 32-player online format for GTA 6, and the company's own submissions call it one of its most closely guarded secrets.
What the filings actually say
The number first came out in January 2026, from documents filed for an earlier interim-relief hearing. 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 at the time as containing "highly confidential and commercially sensitive information relating to the content and features of an unannounced online service."
The new filing, reported on 10 September by GTA BOOM and Dexerto, says two claimants "discussed an online 32 player format which was highly confidential at that time." GTA BOOM reports that it cites witness evidence from Jennifer Kolbe, Rockstar's Head of Publishing, who called the sharing of player numbers "extraordinarily alarming". Per Dexerto, Rockstar's statement compares its secrecy to Apple protecting the iPhone.
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 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 GTA BOOM expects to run until mid-October, about five weeks before GTA 6 ships.
Why 32 matches GTA Online today, and why it still isn't final
Here's the part that actually affects how you'll play the game. GTA Online already holds 32 people per session: Rockstar has listed support for 30 players and two spectators since GTA V's PC launch in 2015, and GamesRadar+ made the same point in January. So 32 isn't a bump over GTA Online. It's the slot count the current game already has, not the leap to 60 or 100 that speculation has floated for years. That fits a studio that tends to carry systems forward 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.
Correction, 29 September 2026: This post originally presented the 32-player detail as a fresh revelation and called 32 a bump over GTA Online's 30 players. Both were wrong. The number was first reported in January 2026, and the September filing repeated it. GTA Online already runs 30 players plus two spectators, 32 slots in total. The headline, the introduction and the section on the number have been corrected. Since this posted, Take-Two's CEO has also said GTA 6 launches as a single-player experience; here's what he said.
The current state of the online question lives in our GTA 6 Online hub.