GTA 6 online mode appears to receive Rockstar's first public acknowledgment, via mention of in-development "32 player format" in legal docs

As court battle between company and fired staff begins its final trial

Up until now, Rockstar Games have kept mum about what plans they have for the future of Grand Theft Auto multiplayer once GTA 6 releases on consoles in November. Thanks to filings submitted by the studio as part of the final hearing in a legal battle over the firings of 34 developers last year, that silence appears to have been broken.

Deep in the lengthy docs, which Rockstar Games and Take-Two Interactive themselves have emailed to RPS, Rockstar claim that one of the in-development game features fired staff were "candidly referencing" in discussions on a union-run Discord server was an "online 32 player format which was highly confidential at that time". Based on that albeit very brief description, it sounds like a framework for 32 player online sessions in GTA 6 (or some new version of GTA Online) attached to the fresh entry in the crime series.

"As described in the witness evidence of Ms Kolbe [Jennifer Kolbe, Rockstar studio director] ‘To see team members sharing details regarding online player numbers for a confidential project, not yet in the public domain, was extraordinarily alarming’," the filing continues. "The alarm was heightened because just a few months earlier there had been a damaging leak of design decisions and main character names which was major news in the GTA VI fan world and spoiled elements of the reveal that were intended to be part of a carefully curated marketing approach."

There is a certain irony in Rockstar insisting that knowledge of game features potentially being revealed to the public outside of official marketing beats was something they were very concerned about, then drawing attention to alleged instances of this happening themselves in legal filings they've subsequently sent to journalists. Arguable Streisand Effecting aside, they're obviously trying to prove they were justified in making those firings last year.

That the fired staff were leaking "confidential information on a public forum" is the central accusation the company have made in their efforts to have the case end in their favour. On the other side, the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IWGB) have accused Rockstar of being motivated by union busting in letting the devs go. The final hearing in the legal battle between the two is set to run until at least October 15th.

As to how I'd feel about 32 player sessions in a GTA 6 online mode, my answer would be to ask Rockstar whether those missile-firing Oppressor Mark 2 rocket bikes will be migrating across from GTA 5's online component. If so, I'm not sure having a couple more multimillionare murderers on the loose at once will do much more than lead me to spend more time sitting in the burning husk of whichever fancy car I've decided to commute between jobs in.

For now, we still don't know when any online component of GTA 6 will arrive, much in the same way we don't know when it'll hit PC. Perhaps the two birds will be killed with one missile once the base game comes out on console in November. Odds are we're in for at least somewhat of a wait on both fronts, though.