So, yeah, the last 24 hours have been one of the most insane roller coaster rides we’ve ever seen here at GameRanx, and it was pretty much all focused on what’s going on with Rockstar Games and their publisher at Take-Two Interactive. After all, just 24 hours ago, we were talking about what “might happen” at the Take-Two earnings call, whether or not a certain game would get certain content or not, and then, there were protests at Rockstar about the firings that had occurred recently. Naturally, the developer fought back against allegations of “Union-Busting,” but things have taken an interesting turn on that front.
On the GTAForums site, a person has come forward to make a statement on the matter, stating that they are indeed a current member of the Rockstar Games staff and have been with the company for many years. Just as important, while they wished to remain anonymous for obvious reasons, they did say that they would be “verified” by the staff of the site, and would prove who they are via DM, and the staff claims that their story checks out.
So, what did they say? To keep it brief, they made it clear that this WAS a case of Union-Busting, and that things were carried out in a shady manner.
More specifically, many of the 30+ people at the UK branch were brought to the HR office under the “friendly guise” of just needing to talk, only to be told they were fired and then “frogmarched” out of the building. They also claim that every single one of the people was indeed part of a union, and that none of them were leakers, as the union had a Discord all their own, and there were no leaked documents posted within the Discord at any time.
They went even further by noting that some of the people fired were the heads of the Union Organizing Board, and that the group itself had just gotten to the union threshold for total members to start working on a collective bargaining agreement with Rockstar to ensure fair treatment of all employees.
If this is true, which we cannot independently verify right now, then this would indeed paint Rockstar in a bad light. This is someone, allegedly, within the company blowing the whistle on them and their practices, and that could hurt them in many ways if proven true.
We’ll keep our eyes on this going forward.
