Rockstar trial filings reveal GTA VI Online tested a 32-player format

Rockstar has said nothing about what GTA VI Online will look like. That silence broke, without the company meaning it to, inside its own labor tribunal in Glasgow.

What happened

In filings Rockstar submitted to the Glasgow Employment Tribunal as part of the case over the dismissal of 31 former employees, the company describes a private chat, nicknamed "Room C," inside the IWGB union's Discord server. Per Rockstar's own submission, quoted by GTA Boom: "Other Claimants in Room C were candidly referencing game features, one of the most closely guarded secrets of the company. Two discussed an online 32 player format which was highly confidential at that time."

This isn't the first time that number has surfaced. Back in January, documents from a preliminary hearing already showed Discord messages where dismissed employees talked about the difficulty of organizing "large sessions" of 32 players, in the context of internal testing and time-off scheduling. At the time, Rockstar's lawyers described those messages as "highly confidential and commercially sensitive information relating to the content and features of an unannounced online service." September's filing goes further: it no longer talks about sensitive information in general, it directly calls the 32-player format one of the company's most closely guarded secrets.

The evidence also includes testimony from Jennifer Kolbe, Rockstar's head of publishing, who called it "extraordinarily alarming" to see employees sharing player-count figures for a confidential project.

Rockstar used the same hearing to lay out how tightly it guards GTA VI's security: visitors sign NDAs, photography is banned outright, contractors are escorted by security, and personal laptops, phones, and tablets are blocked from company systems. The company compared protecting its design secrets to Apple guarding the iPhone or Coca-Cola guarding its formula. It also revealed that, weeks before this hearing, a hacking group attempted to blackmail it.

What is confirmed

Documents Rockstar submitted to the Glasgow Employment Tribunal, as part of the trial that opened September 10, 2026, mention a "32-player online format" for GTA VI and describe it as highly confidential. That mention surfaced through former employees' Discord messages and Rockstar's own legal filings, not through a company announcement.

What we cannot say yet

Rockstar has not confirmed through any official channel that GTA VI Online will launch with 32-player lobbies. The court filings themselves don't say that either: they only establish that the format was tested or discussed internally at some point in development. The number could easily have changed since then, in either direction. Worth noting: GTA Online, the GTA V version, currently also supports 32 players per session (30 active plus 2 spectator slots), so the figure doesn't necessarily point to an expansion over the previous game.

Why it matters

Rockstar has avoided talking about GTA VI Online since the first trailer. Not a word in the presentations, not a hint in August's "Extended Look." Journalist Jason Schreier had already said the studio has no plans to discuss the online mode any time soon. Inside that total silence, a court document has become, for now, the most concrete reference point that exists on the size of GTA VI's online sessions. It confirms nothing about launch, but it confirms Rockstar was already working with that number, and cared enough about it that it ended up in the paperwork of a wrongful-dismissal trial.