Top Secret GTA 6 Feature Accidentally Revealed In Rockstar Court Battle

Before we get started here, let's take a moment and explain the headline. You see, Rockstar's in a bit of legal hot water right now for terminating a group of employees in Scotland over purportedly leaking information about GTA VI into a non-company Discord. The only problem is that they were union members speaking in a union Discord. The leaked information was apparently so juicy that the Rockstar lawyer refused to say it out loud in court and asked the judge to say it for him. What was it? That GTA VI's online component will apparently support at least 32 players in a single game session.

Yep, that's the top secret GTA VI news, which was so precious and so secret that Rockstar apparently fired more than 30 employees over it. That's according to reporting from the quite-trustworthy "People Make Games," a YouTube channel started by a husband-and-wife team of advocate journalists covering humanitarian issues within the games industry. People Make Games, as journalists, were allowed access to the court records in the ongoing case, and while the channel wasn't allowed to record pictures or video, they transcribed the Discord messages that supposedly prompted the firing.


Here's Rockstar's statement along with the three most offensive messages. If you're reading them and thinking "what does that even mean," well, let us explain. The first message, in the top right, is remarking that Rockstar purportedly stated that it wants at least 43 employees there from the Edinburgh QA team at all times, presumably to ensure it can conduct large playtests.

The second message in the bottom-left, seemingly a reply to a reply to the first message, seems to say that the employees performed a playtest with 32 players in a single session. If they have a 56- or 60-person team, it does seem fairly simple to corral 32 people for a playtest. Finally, the third message seems to be a complaint about the studio limiting time off considering the large number of QA testers available.


Is 32 players in a session impressive? Well, that depends on the scope and detail of the simulation, honestly. The current- and previous-generation versions of Grand Theft Auto V (meaning PS4, Xbox One, and later releases, including PC) support 30 active players at once, plus two dedicated slots for spectators, meaning you can have—yes—32 active players connected to a game session at once.

Things can get incredibly chaotic with 32 active players, but the game world in GTA V Online is really not particularly reactive; there's not much going on besides whatever the players are doing, so it never really gets overwhelming, even when you have ten people flying around in P-996 Lazer fighter jets. Meanwhile, GTA VI is supposedly going to have a much more involved and richer world, which could make things more interesting with a large number of players.


If you're interested in the story about Rockstar's alleged union-busting behaviors, you can check out the People Make Games video above; it's an interesting watch—Rockstar purportedly fired a guy for mentioning that his group wasn't seeing any crunch yet. Not a great look, if true, but we're not a UK court, so we don't get to make that judgment. Instead, we're simply patiently waiting for GTA VI on November 19th like the rest of the gaming public.