Up to 32 employees were affected by the studio’s recent decision.
Layoffs in the video game industry just keep coming. In a post on social media, ZA/UM Studio, the developer and publisher of Disco Elysium and more recently, Zero Parades: For Dead Spies, announced that it “served redundancy or at-risk notices impacting up to 32 of our colleagues across all departments at ZA/UM Studio.”
The news of the layoffs comes only a few months after the studio’s latest game was released in May. ZA/UM Studio attributed the layoffs to the weak “commercial performance” of Zero Parades: For Dead Spies, which “has not enabled us to sustain a studio of our current size.” According to SteamDB, the espionage RPG hit an all-time peak of 3,177 players around the time of its release, but has steadily declined since.
For diehard Disco Elysium fans, the news of layoffs may not come as a total surprise. After the success of the narrative-heavy RPG in 2019, ZA/UM Studio went through a series of conflicts including the firing of the game’s core team, a lawsuit involving intellectual property theft and accusations of a hostile work environment for women. Former devs with ZA/UM Studio subsequently made their own studio called Longdue, which is also working on a “narrative-first” game. As for the latest layoffs, ZA/UM Studio said it’s still “continued to consult and work with representatives of the ZA/UM Workers’ Alliance.”
