Rockstar Called Staff Back to the Office Five Days a Week in 2024
An internal email tied the mandate directly to finishing GTA 6, and cited security as a reason. Rockstar never commented publicly.
On February 28, 2024, Bloomberg's Jason Schreier reported that Rockstar had told staff to return to the office five days a week from that April, ending the hybrid arrangements that had persisted since 2020.
The internal email came from Jenn Kolbe, Rockstar's head of publishing. Its stated reasoning tied the decision explicitly to the game: the change "puts us in the best position to deliver the next Grand Theft Auto at the level of quality and polish we know it requires, along with a publishing roadmap that matches the scale and ambition of the game." The two reasons given were productivity and security.
That second word carried weight. Rockstar had by then been breached twice — the September 2022 intrusion that put early development footage online, and the December 2023 trailer leak that forced an early release. A five-day office mandate is, among other things, a control measure.
Schreier's reporting characterised Rockstar as entering the final stages of development. Notably, it contained no delay claim; that came later, and from a different direction.
Two caveats worth stating plainly. Rockstar never issued a public statement on the mandate, so everything above is reporting rather than company record — though it was corroborated widely and never disputed. And return-to-office decisions are not evidence about a game's quality or schedule in either direction, however often they get read that way.
The policy became part of the backdrop to a much larger story in late 2025, when Rockstar dismissed more than thirty UK and Canadian staff amid a union dispute that is still before an employment tribunal.