Rockstar Workers Start Voting on a Union — and GTA VI Launches in the Middle of It

On Thursday, one week before the biggest game launch in history, the people who made the game started voting on whether to unionize.

More than 1,600 Rockstar Games employees in the UK are eligible in a recognition ballot that opened on November 12 and runs through November 26, The Register reported. The vote decides whether Rockstar formally recognizes the Rockstar Game Workers Union, part of the Independent Workers' Union of Great Britain (IWGB). It is being held online and anonymously. Nearly every UK employee below director level can take part. Grand Theft Auto VI launches on November 19 — day eight of the ballot.

This is not a strike vote, and nobody is being asked to stop work. Staff are voting on a recognition deal that workers and management have already spent four months negotiating. The union first asked Rockstar for recognition on June 30, and talks began in July. What is on the table is a finished text, not an idea.

What a yes would build

If the ballot passes, the Rockstar Game Workers Union becomes the largest recognized union in the UK games industry. Recognition would give workers a formal say in negotiations over pay, overtime, pensions, bonuses and leave, and consultation rights over HR policies and the company's use of AI. The IWGB's announcement of the deal also listed redundancies and flexible working among the subjects it covers.

Rockstar's staff in the US and India are not part of this ballot. The unit is the UK workforce — the Edinburgh, Dundee, Leeds, Lincoln and London studios where GTA VI was principally built.

Management, for its part, has said publicly that it will live with the result. Jennifer Kolbe, Rockstar's head of publishing, told Bloomberg: "We go where the team goes. So if they want a union, they will have a union."

The year that got them here

The ballot arrives after a year of open conflict between Rockstar and the IWGB. In October 2025, Rockstar fired 31 workers in its UK studios. The union says those workers were singled out for taking part in a private Discord group where staff discussed organizing. Rockstar denies that, and says the dismissals were for gross misconduct — in its account, confidential company information shared where it should not have been.

That dispute is still moving. It reached an employment tribunal, where Rockstar tried and failed to have the blacklisting allegations struck from the case. Closing submissions in the tribunal are expected on November 17 and 18 — the two days immediately before GTA VI goes on sale.

The fired workers have kept their own campaign deliberately separate from the game's launch. In an IWGB video released in August, one of them, Jack Hoxby, put it this way, as IGN reported at the time: "We poured years of our lives into helping build this game. We don't want you to boycott it. We want you to help us fight for justice."

Two verdicts in one week

The calendar now stacks three dates on top of each other. The tribunal hears its closing submissions on November 17 and 18. GTA VI launches worldwide on November 19, more than thirteen years after GTA V. The ballot closes on November 26, by which point the game will have been in players' hands for a week.

Support for the vote has come from elsewhere in the industry. SAG-AFTRA publicly applauded the ballot this week, and the Communications Workers of America, which represents workers at Blizzard, has also backed the campaign.

"I am incredibly proud of the work we've put into making this game," one Rockstar animation programmer and union representative said. "I'm also proud of the union we've built here. For me, those two things are connected."

Alex Marshall, the IWGB's president, framed the stakes beyond one studio: "What happens at Rockstar matters beyond the studio. Workers across the games industry are watching, and this ballot is an opportunity to show what can be achieved when people come together, organize and build the collective power to shape their own working lives."

By the time the result is known, GTA VI's first-week numbers will be known too. Rockstar will find out what its game did and what its workforce decided in the same stretch of days, and only one of those two results was ever in the company's control.