The studio behind Disco Elysium will lay off 32 workers two months after launching a new game

ZA/UM, the studio behind the critically and commercially acclaimed hit Disco Elysium, has begun laying off up to 32 employees across all departments. This comes barely two months after releasing their next game, the isometric RPG Zero Parades: For Dead Spies, a game descended from Disco Elysium made without any of the original creators of the game that brought them their original success.

Disco Elysium Download

A studio that hasn’t managed things well

The reason for the layoffs is that the game hasn’t met expectations, which is why it “can’t sustain a studio of our current size”. Though the studio says the layoffs “change the shape of ZA/UM but not its purpose. Our artistic standards don’t change: we will endure”.

Born in Estonia as a collective of artists from different disciplines led by novelist Robert Kurvitz, in 2016 they incorporated as a company to develop their first video game: an isometric RPG inspired by the role-playing sessions run by Kurvitz himself. Under the name No Truce with the Furies, it was finally released in 2019 under the name Disco Elysium, becoming an enormous critical and commercial success.

Despite the success, in 2022 Kurvitz, Aleksander Rostov and Helen Hindpere were fired from the studio, considered ZA/UM’s founders and leaders. For his part, Martin Luida, another of ZA/UM’s founders, dissolved the original cultural association believing that the dismissals had taken place under false pretenses.

Now in court, with Kurviz accusing the company’s CEO (Ilmar Kompus) of having schemed to take his company from him, after ZA/UM had already laid off a quarter of its staff back in February 2024, and ZA/UM having, so far, splintered into four other studios that claim to carry on the true spirit of Disco Elysium (Red Info Ltd., Dark Math Games, Longdue Games and Summer Eternal) it seems the drama is going to last a long time. Especially considering that ZA/UM doesn’t seem to know what it’s doing.