On 28 February 2024, Rockstar Games informed staff that, from 15 April 2024, the majority of employees would be required to attend the office five days per week, ending the hybrid and flexible-working arrangements that had been in place since the COVID-19 pandemic (IWGB, 2024; Fertino, 2024). The decision triggered a public confrontation with the Independent Workers' Union of Great Britain (IWGB) Game Workers Branch, which represents organised developers at Rockstar's UK studios — most notably Rockstar North in Edinburgh and Rockstar Lincoln. Within twenty-four hours of the internal announcement, the IWGB issued a formal statement accusing the company of "broken promises", "reckless decision making" and a refusal to consult workers, framing the return-to-office (RTO) mandate as the latest in a sequence of unilateral management moves out of step with the studio's own stated commitments to flexibility (IWGB, 2024). This report sets out the IWGB's specific criticisms of the policy reversal, the testimonies it published from anonymised Rockstar staff, the broader industrial context in which the dispute unfolded, and the media reception of the union's statement.
The IWGB's central charge against Rockstar was not simply that the company was ending remote work, but that it was reversing a previously communicated position. According to the union's 29 February 2024 statement, Rockstar management had earlier issued an employee-wide email stating: "This isn't our first step to 5 days a week. No one wants to go back to the old way of working." (IWGB, 2024). The IWGB argued that the April 2024 mandate "marks a U-turn from previous statements in which the company insisted flexible work options would remain available" (IWGB, 2024). Insider Gaming, in its coverage of the union's statement, highlighted this framing as the union's primary grievance, alongside Rockstar's stated justifications of "security concerns and reduced productivity" (Fertino, 2024).
The 2024 RTO mandate also came almost exactly one year after an earlier dispute. In early 2023, when Rockstar moved from a remote-default arrangement to mandatory three-day office attendance, 170 UK-based Rockstar workers signed an IWGB-organised petition opposing the change — described by the union as "one of the biggest ever trade union actions in the UK games industry to date" (IWGB, 2024). The 2024 escalation to a full five-day mandate, in the union's framing, demonstrated that the 2023 compromise had been an interim step rather than a stable settlement, vindicating worker scepticism at the time.
The IWGB statement articulated several distinct lines of criticism, which can be grouped under four headings:
Lack of consultation. The union accused Rockstar of unilateral decision-making, noting that "select individuals were notified in early February, though official communications took over three weeks to emerge, leaving many anxious of circulating rumours" (IWGB, 2024). An anonymous worker quoted in the statement said: "As usual, there has been zero consultation with us: the people who these policy changes most affect" (IWGB, 2024).
Disproportionate impact on vulnerable staff. The IWGB highlighted the "difficulties that this decision will pose to employees with disabilities, care responsibilities, or health issues", arguing that the blanket mandate did not adequately accommodate equality-related needs and could fall foul of reasonable-adjustment obligations under the Equality Act 2010 (IWGB, 2024). Workers who had relocated during the pandemic or restructured childcare arrangements faced "under 6 weeks" to comply with the new requirement (IWGB, 2024).
Risk of a return to crunch. A recurrent theme in the statement was concern that physical co-location was a precursor to renewed extended-hours working — the so-called "culture of crunch" extensively documented by Jason Schreier and others in 2018 (Schreier, 2018; IWGB, 2024). One anonymous worker said: "After so many broken promises we now fear management may even be paving the way for a return to toxic 'crunch' practices" (IWGB, 2024). Another worker emphasised the practical effect of losing remote access for international coordination: "Just one of my concerns is being forced to work late hours in the office to maintain contact with global teams when before we could log on from home to attend late meetings. This will mean missing out on spending time with our families" (IWGB, 2024).
Lack of evidentiary basis. The union challenged Rockstar's stated rationale, observing that management cited "security concerns and reduced productivity without providing employees with any supporting evidence", while pointing to peer-reviewed and trade-press research suggesting that mandatory office return does not improve productivity or company value but does reduce employee wellbeing (IWGB, 2024).
Austin Kelmore, then Chair of the IWGB Game Workers Branch, was quoted as situating the dispute within a broader campaign for "transparency over pay and promotions, a healthy and inclusive workplace culture, and work life balance centred around what each worker needs" (IWGB, 2024). Kelmore's statement explicitly tied the Rockstar mandate to a wider pattern in the industry: "Workers across the industry are done with letting executives make reckless and harmful decisions and the Rockstar workers are showing us the start of what's to come if they're continually ignored." He concluded by appealing for new members, arguing that organising was the only mechanism through which "the healthy and sustainable games industry we know it can be" could be realised (IWGB, 2024).
This positioning reflected the IWGB's broader strategic narrative, in which Rockstar — owing to its size, prominence and association with the Grand Theft Auto franchise — operates as a bellwether for working conditions across the British games sector. The union explicitly contrasted the company's commercial dependence on developer labour ("our passion, skill, and talent should never be taken for granted by studio management") with the perceived disposability implied by management's communication style (IWGB, 2024).
Rockstar's public response to the IWGB statement was, in practice, silence. The Insider Gaming write-up of 29 February 2024 noted that at the time of publication "Rockstar has not issued an official reply to the IWGB's new claims or testimonies" (Fertino, 2024). Internal communications — quoted indirectly via the IWGB and via earlier Insider Gaming reporting on the RTO email itself — framed the decision as a response to Grand Theft Auto VI entering its "final stages of development", with productivity and security cited as the dual rationales (Fertino, 2024). The security argument was widely understood as a reference to the September 2022 GTA VI source-code and gameplay leak by Arion Kurtaj of the Lapsus$ group, who was sentenced to an indefinite hospital order in December 2023 (Fertino, 2024). The IWGB did not dispute the seriousness of the leak but rejected the inference that a blanket five-day attendance requirement was a proportionate or evidence-based remedy.
The February 2024 IWGB statement subsequently came to be treated, in retrospective coverage, as the first significant public skirmish in a longer-running industrial dispute at Rockstar. When 31 Edinburgh-based developers — all IWGB members — were dismissed in October 2025, multiple outlets explicitly linked the firings back to the 2024 RTO confrontation, observing that "in early 2024, the company faced union criticism for requiring workers to return to office five days per week" (Channel News, 2025; Fertino, 2024). The Register similarly noted that the 2024 RTO mandate had been justified on productivity and security grounds, the latter "doubtless heightened by a leak of in-development code for Grand Theft Auto 6" (The Register, 2025). The continuity between the two episodes — same union, same studio, same managerial style of unilateral communication — was used by the IWGB to support its later argument that Rockstar's posture toward organised labour had hardened over the GTA VI production cycle.
The IWGB's February 2024 statement remains the most fully articulated public critique of Rockstar's return-to-office policy. It combined a procedural complaint (no consultation, late notice, broken promises), an equalities argument (impact on disabled, caring and relocated workers), a substantive workplace concern (the risk of renewed crunch), and an evidentiary challenge (the absence of data behind the productivity rationale). Whatever assessment is made of Rockstar's underlying security concerns, the episode marked an inflection point: the moment at which an organised UK games-industry union demonstrated both the capacity and the willingness to publicly contest a major studio's flagship workforce policy, setting the rhetorical and organisational template for the larger disputes that followed during the run-up to Grand Theft Auto VI.
Channel News (2025) 'Rockstar Games Accused of Union Busting After Firing Dozens of Staff', ChannelNews, 3 November. Available at: https://www.channelnews.com.au/rockstar-games-accused-of-union-busting-after-firing-dozens-of-staff/ (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Fertino, A. (2024) 'IWGB And Union Members Criticize Rockstar For Return to Office', Insider Gaming, 29 February. Available at: https://insider-gaming.com/iwgb-and-union-members-criticize-rockstar-for-return-to-office/ (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
IWGB (2024) 'Game workers forced back to office oppose "reckless decision" from Rockstar', Independent Workers' Union of Great Britain, 29 February. Available at: https://iwgb.org.uk/en/post/rockstar-games-mandatory-office/ (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Schreier, J. (2018) 'Inside Rockstar Games' Culture of Crunch', Kotaku, 23 October. Available at: https://kotaku.com/inside-rockstar-games-culture-of-crunch-1829936466 (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
The Register (2025) 'IWGB accuses Rockstar Games of "union busting"', The Register, 3 November. Available at: https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/03/rockstar_games_fires_staff_in/ (Accessed: 14 May 2026).