Rockstar tells tribunal Discord is a security hole. Anonymous people have been assembling the map of its unreleased game there for years

Anyone can open the interactive map of the state of Leonida, the setting of the upcoming Grand Theft Auto VI, in their browser today. Rockstar Games did not publish it — it was assembled mostly by anonymous people on Discord, partly from game-engine coordinates that a hacker stole from the company in 2022. That same Rockstar is right now defending, before an employment tribunal in Glasgow, its dismissal of 34 employees by arguing that Discord is a security hole — a room where, according to the company, "hundreds are wearing masks." Game Developer ↗

A World Assembled by Strangers

The State of Leonida project is a pure community product. The map lets you zoom in on individual areas, roads, and buildings, switch the view to real-world Florida for comparison, and add photos and videos to specific locations. It features Vice City as well as other areas that Rockstar has so far only shown in promotional materials — Leonida Keys, Grassrivers, Port Gellhorn, and Mount Kalaga. The company has still not published the game's complete official map to this day. Sector.sk ↗

Besides the map, the site itself contains only two more things: a countdown to the game's release and a statement that it is not affiliated with Rockstar Games or Take-Two Interactive "in any way, shape or form." The site itself does not say who maintains it — the names of contributors, most often a user going by Yanis, can only be found through community wikis and forums. State of Leonida ↗ No one on the outside can judge how accurate the map actually is. The community trusts itself, but it can only be verified once the game is released.

What the map looks like in motion, and how Yanis's version 16 differs from earlier ones, is shown in a community walkthrough published on 20 September. It is fan-scene material, not journalism.

Where the Coordinates Come From

The raw material for much of the reconstruction is data from the 2022 breach at Rockstar. Behind it was Arion Kurtaj of the Lapsus$ group, who released 90 videos from GTA VI's development onto the internet — more than a year before the first official trailer. He reportedly hacked from a Travelodge hotel, where he was under police protection, using nothing more than an Amazon Firestick, the hotel television, and a phone. In 2023, a court committed him to a secure hospital for an indefinite period. According to the BBC, he has since been released from there and is now in an ordinary prison awaiting a retrial in November — the same month the game is due to be released. PC Gamer ↗

A 192-gigabyte archive from that same breach surfaced on September 18. It is not a new leak but old data that has resurfaced. Besides a canceled Liberty City expansion for GTA V, it also contains early versions of the GTA VI map — without vegetation, with flat textures, and in places only rough outlines. The source does not claim that the community reconstruction could be verified against it. This is a far earlier development state than the game that will actually ship. Insider Gaming ↗

What Rockstar Says About Discord — In Its Own Words

The tribunal in Glasgow began on September 10 and is scheduled to run until October 16, just under five weeks before the game's release. Rockstar maintains throughout that it dismissed all 34 people for gross misconduct related to the leak of confidential information, not for union activity. In the filing that Take-Two provided to Game Developer, it says that guarding GTA VI's design is "akin to Apple protecting the iPhone or Coke protecting its formula," and speaks of the security posture of a "Wall Street bank." By its own account, it employs five full-time investigators and a director, and has fitted window film to its buildings after someone tried to photograph through them using drones. Game Developer ↗

In the same document, Rockstar describes Discord as a system of three rooms. According to the company, two smaller ones belonged to the union, and it claims it did not know who was in them or what was happening in them at the time of the layoffs — it only received the contents of the smallest one in August 2026, when the dismissed employees were compelled to hand it over. It gained access to the third, incomparably larger one, in October 2025. According to the filing, it held nearly 350 people, including former employees, competitors, and one journalist, and most of them could not be identified because they went by nicknames: "It was like walking into a room where some people are identifiable but hundreds are wearing masks." Rockstar also cites the 2022 leak — the very one the community map now feeds on — as a reason for its vigilance.

What the Other Side Says

The dismissed employees who turned to the tribunal — 31 of the 34 fired were members of the IWGB union — describe a targeted "decimation" in their opening filing. They claim that Rockstar had an informant in their union Discord from February 2024 who sent reports to HR manager Charlie Kinloch, and that at least 26 communications about that server took place over 21 months, roughly half of them initiated by Kinloch himself. According to the filing, the union announced on that server on October 18, 2025 that membership had crossed the ten-percent threshold after which it could apply for statutory recognition in Britain. Six days later, vice president of information security Abid Ansari requested access to the server; on the evening of October 29, managers received lists of names, and the layoffs began the following morning. Game Developer ↗

According to the filing, people received pre-prepared dismissal letters with no specific accusation and were escorted from the workplace. Rockstar denies the allegations and also argues that it dismissed three people in Canada who were not union members. "For almost a year, the truth about what happened to us has been buried by Rockstar and surrounded by speculation," said dismissed employee Jason Lewis in a statement the union released before the hearing began. Alongside the tribunal, the union is also negotiating recognition with Rockstar — if they reach an agreement, it would create the largest union-recognized game studio in Britain. IWGB ↗

The BBC spoke to one of the dismissed workers, Jack Hoxby, back in December 2025 — shortly after the layoffs and long before the hearing began.

Asymmetry

Take-Two knows how to strike against fans quickly and without warning. When a modder going by Dark Space turned part of Leonida into a playable form in GTA V in March 2025, his video disappeared following a copyright complaint. "I would have gladly taken it down if they had just asked," he wrote afterward. The browser-based map, which does the same reconstruction work but simply isn't playable, remains up. GTA BOOM ↗

It would be a mistake, however, to think the company has no leverage over anonymous people. Last summer, it filed so-called DMCA subpoenas against Microsoft and Discord — legal orders that let a publisher compel a platform to reveal a user's identity without first suing them. In Discord's case it demanded literally "all identifying information associated with all user accounts" that had communicated on servers linked to the leaks. Both companies were required to hand over the data by September 4. So a tool for unmasking a room full of nicknames does exist, and Take-Two is using it. PC Gamer ↗

That's the crux of the matter. Rockstar isn't telling the tribunal that Discord is dangerous by coincidence — it's saying so about a platform where the largest unofficial reconstruction of its own game is simultaneously running, and against which it is already sending lawyers. The difference lies in speed and cost. The company dismissed the employees who were in the room with name tags in a single morning. It has spent months uncovering the people in the room with nicknames through the courts, and meanwhile the map stays online. Whether that October morning was lawful will be decided by the tribunal by mid-October.

Limits of This Account

Both versions of events are, for now, only the parties' filings. The tribunal has not ruled, and the claims about an informant and about the compiling of name lists are allegations by the dismissed employees, not established facts. Likewise, Rockstar's description of Discord comes from its own defense. The comparison is also not legally symmetrical — employment law and copyright enforcement are two different tools with different speeds and different burdens of proof, so these are not equivalent cases. And the fact that the map is still online cannot be taken to mean the company would never take action against it: we know nothing about any takedown notices that never became public.

One question also remains open — one the community asks itself: whether a reconstruction built partly on stolen data still counts as fan work, or whether it is simply another round of spreading the same leak whose originator is awaiting trial in prison.

What hotinfo Is Tracking

Illustrative photo: the headquarters of Rockstar North studio in Edinburgh, one of the company's British offices. Photo: Discott, Wikimedia Commons, CC0.