ZA/UM has announced a round of layoffs today after the studio’s latest game, Zero Parades: For Dead Spies, failed to perform commercially. The studio is best known for developing the 2019 narrative role-playing game Disco Elysium.
The studio made the announcement in a post on Bluesky. ZA/UM says that while Zero Parades was released to critical acclaim, it’s “commercial performance has not enabled us to sustain a studio of our current size. As a result, the studio has served redundancy and at-risk notices to 32 employees across all departments. Their work has made a lasting difference and left its mark on Zero Parades: For Dead Spies, and the studio as a whole,” the announcement reads.
ZA/UM also says that during this process it has consulted with representatives from the studio’s union, ZA/UM Workers’ Alliance. While the layoffs will change the landscape of the studio, ZA/UM says it will not change its purpose: “We will persist.” ZA/UM previously conducted layoffs in 2024, affecting up to 24 workers.
Zero Parades: For Dead Spies released this May as the highly anticipated follow-up to Disco Elysium. The espionage RPG retained much of the same narrative and mechanical hallmarks of the studio’s debut title. Here’s what we said about it in our review:
Zero Parades is an absolutely absorbing mystery that lies somewhere in the cross-section between geopolitical thriller, comedy of errors, and humanist tragedy. When it’s not trying too hard to retrace Disco Elysium’s signature, Zero Parades excels as a complicated story of a perpetual fuck-up desperately searching for redemption.
ZA/UM has itself been the subject of much controversy and discussion in the years since Disco Elysium’s release. In 2021, a number of Disco Elysium’s key creatives (including lead designer Robert Kurvitz) were ousted from the studio. This set in motion a series of legal battles, reports, and documentaries trying to unravel the story of what actually happened. The saga is ongoing, and it only seems to get more complicated with time. Zero Parades’ development and release were enveloped by this controversy. Many fans saw buying the game and supporting ZA/UM’s current leadership as a betrayal of the ousted employees. A PlayStation 5 version of Zero Parades is supposedly set to release sometime later this year.
It’s so funny that the oligarch who kicked out Kurvitz and Co out has probably made way, way less money than if he had just not tried that stupid three card monte shit and let them make DE2.
Especially when the company didn’t even control the IP! Did you think awful word of mouth around a brand new IP was a winning formula?
we had good thing going, you stupid bastard
It’s notable that the boycotts may have likely no small part in contributing to this sales performance. Also interesting in the sense that most gaming-related boycotts are typically just hot air with no real consequential impact. This amounted to something, which is quite noteworthy.
A bit of a shame, admittedly, in spite of my negative impressions about the game. Having played Esoteric Ebb, which personally just ultimately made me want to close and play Baldur’s Gate 3 instead (similarly alike to Zero Parades in the sense that its soc-dem writers did not appreciate the political dimensions of what made Disco Elysium so extraordinary) eventually made me give Zero Parades a try.
What I can say about Zero Parades is that the tone of the game is akin to “playing” that TV series, The Americans. Similarly, the creators have no real capacity to explore beyond stock liberal tropes on socialism and socialist states, but what was unique about The Americans was how, in spite of its significantly anti-Soviet and anti-communist narratives - par for the course in Western media - it still humanized and, more importantly, equalized the motivations of “the Commies” for a Western audience. Zero Parades manages to achieve the same.
What I mean by that is, while everyone is unsurprisingly portrayed as jaundiced and cynical about their ideological beliefs, they still remain faithful to their side, which I think is a valuable message to confront Western audiences with. Western propaganda can tolerate the “noble loyalty” of disgusting individuals like Robert E Lee fighting for their homeland and themselves personally as the modern West falls deeper into fascism.
Yet, when it comes to communist-aligned individuals or adversary-coded characters, that’s the real bridge too far and they are portrayed (and expected) to be gunning to defect to the “right side” at any moment.
You also see this with real world examples in how libs are constantly baffled as to why the entirety of the DPRK hasn’t defected yet, apparently believing that the only thing stopping a total refugee crisis being Kim Jong Un personally threatening to execute every generation of a defector down to their Homo Erectus common ancestor. Or their sheer spite after seeing how the Iranian football team didn’t mass-defect while playing in the US.
This is one of the common refrains from the game’s subreddit, which is the same lib and left-lib demographic of Disco Elysium’s but without any integrity that at least the former have through their position on ZA/UM. Their only issue with the game is apparently simply that “it doesn’t give you the choice to defect or consider the communists as an enemy.” Ironically, this was the primary redeeming quality of the game.
The portrayal of the protagonist remaining with their side in spite of their cynicism places them alongside Western counterparts like James Bond, who serves a decrepit imperialist power, rather than being a traitor who teams up with the adversary to fight their own side, Black Panther-style. This is what makes the game evidently rather uncomfortable for those libs, similarly to Disco Elysium’s subreddit where they spend their time cherrypicking lines from that game to demonstrate the writers were merely “wink-wink nudge-nudging” about not actually being serious in portraying communism as a credible thing people can actually genuinely believe in.
It’s a shame, because even though the bar here is literally “narrative treats communist-aligneds with the same motivations and sense of begrudging patriotism as us,” games that give leftists this sort of treatment could be counted on just one hand.
On the other hand, perhaps the venture capitalist inability to successfully squeeze sufficient blood out of this stolen stone might drive a more conciliatory resolution to the theft of ZA/UM or at the very least further motivate the other successors (Red Info Ltd and Summer Eternal) to move forward on their concepts now that the original studio no longer can attract the genre’s audience.
I wonder if these soc dem writer types look at a character like
and think “oh this character is well executed because he has a bad ideology but is still relatable because of his personality” or something extremely shallow like that, because otherwise I don’t understand how they go from Disco Elysium’s treatment of its communist characters to that kind of failure. Like, just read the Deserter’s dialogue for a couple minutes before you write a line for a communist character. Look at how human he is, how he’s kinda right about everything (not about women but hey, can’t win em all) even though his mind is gone, how the things he’s talking about aren’t just lines of propaganda but really more like a coded language that the truth of the universe happens to be written in. If you can’t pull that off, don’t make a Disco Elysium successor.games that give leftists this sort of treatment could be counted on just one hand.
I was going to comment that there are smaller indie games that sometimes treat communists well, but then I remembered when I looked into this on Steam like a month ago and games that deal with communism were overwhelmingly Stalin bad with a few Mao bads or whatever, almost all just pathetic, limp imitations of Papers Please, the 1984 of video games.
Papers Please is such a strange game, because the mechanics make no real sense, you’re a border control officer for a brutal police state that inexplicably has huge numbers of people desperate to immigrate to, and you constantly have to push away otherwise good people because your paycheck is on the line if you break the rules, and your paycheck is always so meager that you have to choose between giving your family enough to eat or being able to pay the heating bill.
It’s like, the most American sort of setting I can think of for a game, but they said, nah, this is communism actually.
It’s like, the most American sort of setting I can think of for a game, but they said, nah, this is communism actually.
It’s a version of communism that was sold to Americans by American propagandists. Remember that they can’t show communism as something that ensures the basics for all. One, they need it to be relatable, and two, they need it to be (on average) worse than the average conditions in a failing American state.
So you get this nonsense version of communism that removes everyone’s agency and forces them into virtually unpaid slave labor for a fat cat commie boss. A version that only makes sense when you realize that it’s showing the condition of the American lower working class. Something that many people recognize and hate, or have spent their lives seeing as antithesis of the American Dream.
That’s part of why I said “1984 of video games,” because 1984 is taking a job as a Beitish propagandist and going “nah, this is communism actually”.
While Papers Please lines up in some respects with Berlin Wall mythology, it’s success surely comes in part from how it reflects well-known evils of America but it just assigns it inexplicably to communism.
A lot of its clones do the same thing, like literally a very recent one is about a brutal, bureaucratic job market that yeah, you can compare it to China if you want, but clearly the relative success of the game is mainly westerners whose own job markets are dehumanizing bullshit. But it’s communism but without the free housing.
This is how liberals think the Berlin wall was, and it makes sense when you consider that Germans would have family on both sides.
I concur that the disco elysium reddit are very much unironic DE Moralists.
Some people there fight off the libs, usually it’s in YT comment sections that people put their politicking hat on and go “The game actually makes fun of EVERY ideology, I am very smart!
” when that happens in the sub they usually get bullied by the power users, lol
Why was there a boycott?
Private equity guys disbanded the art collective and forced out the founders and significant numbers of other staff
When it’s not trying too hard to retrace Disco Elysium’s signature, Zero Parades excels as a complicated story of a perpetual fuck-up desperately searching for redemption.
how is this not retracing disco elysium
To be fair, if you’re vague enough, this could apply to almost any video game story.
It certainly describes my recent Stellaris playthrough
I disagree but for DE it’s such a central theme to the game it’s basically the bit of plotline that exists with only on options how to attempt it and not not do it. You could possibly argue the perpetuity of it - Harry used to be good as a cop - but then spy lady starts off a spy in ZP, she must’ve gotten there somehow.
well in disco elysium you can also tell the redemption arc to just fuck off
I think you might be able to argue things in the following way:
‘Zero Parades can also tell its own earnest story of a perpetual fuck-up seeking redemption - but it loses any authenticity whenever it is mimicking the most superficial elements of Disco Elysium’
I’m not arguing from a position of knowing much about ZP, but I think there’s a nice line to thread there. Between telling a new and interesting story on the one hand, a story that rhymes with DE, and being a cash-grab.
that does make way morre sense
The material base for a sequel has eroded. ZA/UM has betrayed mankind and themselves. The historic opportunity for Disco Elysium 2 has passed. It will not come back anymore. However hard I try, whatever I do.
If EVERY WORKER was A MEMBER OF THE BOARD this never would’ve happened
Oh no, are the scabs being thrown under the bus just like the original team? Who could’ve possibly seen this coming?!
The game devs thought they could critique capital without being subsumed by it.Neo ZA/UM are bums beyond belief
I’m currently playing Zero Parades. It’s good. If it wasn’t for the long shadow cast by DE, it would be amazing.
There are some elements they do better than DE. However, I think that each of those improvements come from just being a more modern game that could take learnings from what worked in DE and what didn’t. The best bits are where the game breaks free to forge its own identity.
Coolest points IMO (light spoilers):
- You play as a woman, and you can really see how this changes the way the world responds to your character (compared to DE).
- There is some very sci-fi stuff in there that’s front and centre to the main plot throughout the game. Nice choice.
- Many characters don’t believe what they’re saying and this really comes through. In DE, everyone feels like they embody their beliefs. In this, nobody does, not matter how loud they are about it. This is both a good and a bad thing.
Everything about the studio aside (which is all worth considering) - it’s a good game. It is right on the edge of being a great game. It certainly isn’t as good as DE, but how could it hope to be? High B/Low A tier IMO.
That’s what i heard. I was thinking of playing it when it released on the PS5, as I don’t really play games on anything else nowadays. It’s too bad for all the laid off workers.
If you can pirate it, pirate it. Especially now that the people who actually made it no longer work there, all of the money they’re making from it is going to the people who not only forced out the first team, but burned through the scabs as well. They don’t deserve a cent for this game, no matter how good it is.
Time to go Good Will HuntingMade me choke on my coffee
I am playing Disco elysium now and i have to admit i would love having Kim as an assistant run by AI.
I know most of you guys hate AI, but the truth is that all npcs on all games are very limited.
Just as an example i dont remember well many things that already happened and he could help as he takes notes of everything. With AI he would eventually recomend me gigs like colecting bottles for recycling as our player dont remember where his money is. We cant ask him about this matter, so of course he cant help despite having his job.Also some moral issues i would like to discuss with him
You don’t really need an LLM to accomplish something like like that, unless you mean for like generating arbitrary VO lines
Good bit
