Disco Elysium Studio ZA/UM Cuts Up to 32 Jobs

ZA/UM Studio, the developer behind 2019's Disco Elysium, is cutting up to 32 jobs across all departments. The studio confirmed the redundancies on social media on Friday afternoon, pinning the decision on the commercial performance of its spiritual successor, Zero Parades: For Dead Spies. Sales were not enough to sustain the operation of the studio's current size.

That size stood at around 100 people as of October 2025, when ZA/UM staff formed the first recognised video game developers' union in the UK, represented by the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain. The studio says it consulted representatives of the ZA/UM Workers' Alliance throughout the process, and up to 32 colleagues have now received redundancy or at-risk notices. That made ZA/UM the first UK games studio with a recognised union, so this round runs through an organised workforce rather than around one. The cuts land on a workforce that organised only a few months earlier, partly in response to conditions inside the studio.

The statement itself kept things short. Zero Parades earned strong reviews, ZA/UM acknowledged, but the money behind it did not follow.

"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."

— ZA/UM Studio

The notice closed on a defiant line, saying the cuts change the shape of ZA/UM but not its purpose, and it asked anyone currently hiring to consider the people leaving.

Reaction came fast, and most of it was hostile. Replies are switched off on both X and Bluesky, so responses arrived through quote posts. One of the more measured came from Bluesky user Eimmy, who put the blame less on the market than on the studio itself.

"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 majority of fans."

— Eimmy

That last line explains why so little sympathy is flowing toward the people running ZA/UM. The studio has spent years as one of the most publicly bitter workplaces in games. Disco Elysium's game director, Robert Kurvitz, and art director, Aleksander Rostov, have accused ZA/UM's owners, Ilmar Kompus and Tõnis Haavel, of taking control of the studio and its intellectual property through fraud, and said they were fired and cut off from their own work after they started asking to see financial records.

Kompus and Haavel rejected any claim of financial wrongdoing and answered with allegations of their own. They said the pair went almost two years without working while still drawing pay, created a toxic environment, and tried to sell the studio's IP to other companies. Kurvitz called that a last-minute push meant to split the workforce and pull attention away from what he described as the owners' own suspected activity. People Make Games has since worked through the whole dispute across two long documentaries, and even after several court cases were dismissed or dropped, the two sides keep trading statements. Former Disco Elysium developers have set up at least four separate studios to build spiritual successors, and several of those have collected legal fights of their own.

This is also not ZA/UM's first round of cuts. In 2024, the studio reportedly cancelled a Disco Elysium spin-off and laid off roughly 24 people. That round brought its own wave of public statements, with accounts describing a workplace worn down by crunch, burnout and conflict. Two years on, the shape of it looks familiar: a well-reviewed project that still fell short at retail, and another group of developers out of work.

The irony sits close to the surface. Disco Elysium is a game about the wreckage capitalism leaves behind, and its studio has spent half a decade caught in the kind of ownership fight the game would have picked apart. Only months ago the company was presenting itself as the opposite of all that. When it publicly rejected triple-A expansion, Zero Parades writer Jim Ashilevi told IGN he wanted ZA/UM to stay small and independent.

"I hope we'll never become a triple-A studio."

— Jim Ashilevi

In the same conversation, he said he hoped the team would hold onto its values even if Zero Parades sold four billion copies. The real figure came in far below what the studio needed to keep everyone employed. Ashilevi also called the wider market grim for business but healthy for creativity, and pointed to Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 as proof that players still want single-player, story-led games made outside the big publishers. Zero Parades fit that description almost exactly.

The studio does have a back catalogue to lean on. Disco Elysium remains a fixture, and it even became a free Epic Games Store gift one time, a giveaway that put the original detective RPG in front of a wave of players who never paid a cent for it. None of that reach carried over to Zero Parades in the numbers ZA/UM needed.

I keep coming back to Disco Elysium as one of the few games I boot up for the writing before anything else, so watching its studio shed close to a third of its staff is hard to wave off. I don't buy the idea that critical acclaim simply failed to convert here; years of public feuding damaged the brand long before Zero Parades reached storefronts. The people now holding redundancy notices inherited a fight they had no hand in starting. If ZA/UM does fall, and Eimmy is not the only one expecting it to, I suspect the record will show the deepest wounds were self-inflicted.

Zero Parades launched two months ago with clear echoes of Disco Elysium and pulled a five-star review from Eurogamer, where Alexis Ong praised its reactivity and prose and called it the work of a creative team at the top of its game. Ong read it as a painful, funny trip through the messier corners of human behaviour, made for players who want their fiction to sting. Strong notices do not pay salaries, and the distance between that reception and the sales figures is what puts 32 jobs on the line.