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Spiritual successor's sales not enough "to maintain a studio of our current size" despite critical acclaim.
ZA/UM Studio, the contentious developer at the heart of years of bitter public and legal disputes since the release of 2019's acclaimed Disco Elysium, is to lay off up to 32 staff members "across all departments", it's been announced.
The news comes via a statement from ZA/UM, released on the studio's social media on Friday afternoon, which cited the "commercial performance" of spiritual successor Zero Parades: For Dead Spies as the key reason. Sales, per ZA/UM, were not enough "to sustain a studio of our current size".
The studio was last reported to have around 100 employees, as of October 2025, when its staff formed the first recognised video game developers' union in the UK, represented by the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain. ZA/UM says it has "continued to consult and work with representatives of the ZA/UM Workers' Alliance" throughout the process.
The full statement from ZA/UM reads as follows:
Today, we are sharing difficult news. While Zero Parades: For Dead Spies was released to critical acclaim, its commercial performance has not enabled us to sustain a studio of our current size.
We have served redundancy or at-risk notices impacting up to 32 of our colleagues across all departments at ZA/UM Studio. Their work has made a lasting difference and left its mark on Zero Parades: For Dead Spies, and the studio as a whole.
Throughout this difficult process, we have continued to consult and work with representatives of the ZA/UM Workers' Alliance.
This changes the shape of ZA/UM, but not its purpose. Our artistic standards remain unchained: we will persist.
To anyone currently hiring, please consider the colleagues leaving ZA/UM.
The response to the news has been highly critical across social media, undoubtedly as a result of the studio's extraordinarily controversial history.
"I feel terrible for the workers," wrote one comment on Bluesky from user Eimmy, "especially since gamedev is absolute shit rn (I'm not coming back unless I absolutely have to). They deserve a safe and rewarding job. Unfortunately Zaum is not that place and it will fall sooner or later, since they poisoned the brand for [the] majority of fans".
Of those reacting to the post via the quote function - replies are turned off across both X and Bluesky - this is one of the more measured responses.
As for ZA/UM, it's a complex story, with Disco Elysium's game director Robert Kurvitz and art director Aleksander Rostov accusing ZA/UM's management, namely Ilmar Kompus and Tõnis Haavel, of gaining ownership of the studio and its intellectual property fraudulently, and claiming that they were "summarily fired and cut off from our life's work" after they began asking for financial records from ZA/UM's new owners.
Kompas and Haavel meanwhile denied "any claim of financial malfeasance or fraud" and in turn issued a statement detailing a series of allegations about the fired employees, including "not working at all for almost two years while still being paid by the studio," creating a "toxic work environment", and "attempts to illegally sell to other gaming companies ZA/UM's intellectual property." Kurvitz responded to those allegations at the time to deny them, referring to the claims as "a last-minute push" designed to "create division between workers" and "bait us into a public war of words in order to direct attention away from their suspected illegal activity."
Over the years since, extensive reporting from People Make Games has stressed the complexity of the various disputes, with interviews featured in the two lengthy documentaries adding further to the claims made on either side. Various legal battles have ensued, some of which dismissed or dropped, and yet still contested verbally in tit-for-tat public statements issued from both parties. Meanwhile, at least four studios have been set up by former Disco Elysium developers to make spiritual successors of various forms - and those, too, have been dragged into further legal battles and disputes of their own.
At ZA/UM, this is also not the first round of layoffs the studio has made. In 2024 a Disco Elysium spin-off was reportedly cancelled and around 24 employees laid off by the developer, with yet more public statements issued in the aftermath, this time alleging a workplace "rife with crunch, burnout and conflict."
The result of all this is, as you'd expect, is a mess of recriminations and furious sentiment - only heightened by the deep irony of Disco Elysium's anti-capitalist subject matter - and one that seems unlikely to ever be fully untangled.
As for Zero Parades: For Dead Spies, the spiritual successor released by ZA/UM just two months ago - which has strong similarities to Disco Elysium - has received high praise as a game in itself. Alexis Ong, writing in Eurogamer's five-star Zero Parades review, described it as a game of "bristling reactivity, woven into gorgeous prose and a constellation of characters big and small, each a critical texture in the fabric of a living, breathing story," and "the cumulative work of a creative team at the top of their game."
"It is a narrative distillation of the familiar into a messy, painful journey that feels, at turns, cinematic and mundane, sharp and silly – a fine-tuned caricature of humanity's petty, poisoned psyche, a game made with care, for only the finest sickos."
We've written this so many times over recent years, but as with any case of developers hit with layoffs, Eurogamer wishes all those impacted the very best of luck for the future.
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