ZA/UM Lays Off 32 Staff as Zero Parades Wins Reviews, Not Players

ZA/UM has cut up to 32 jobs, two months after its spy thriller Zero Parades: For Dead Spies opened to some of its best reviews ever. The Disco Elysium studio says strong reviews never turned into strong sales.

Four other studios, all built from ZA/UM’s collapse, are still racing to finish their own Disco Elysium successor. All four remain unreleased, and Zero Parades just became the only real evidence any of them have to go on.

Redundancy Notices Hit Every Department

ZA/UM posted the news on Bluesky and X on July 17, saying it had issued redundancy or at risk notices affecting up to 32 colleagues across every department at the studio. The company framed the cuts as a result of the game’s commercial performance, not its quality.

This changes the shape of ZA/UM, but not its purpose. Our artistic standards remain unchanged: we will persist.

ZA/UM wrote in its July 17 redundancy statement, adding that the departing staff’s work had made a lasting difference on the game and the studio as a whole. The company said it had consulted throughout with the ZA/UM Workers’ Alliance, its in house labor union, and asked other studios currently hiring to consider the colleagues losing their jobs.

Why Didn’t Great Reviews Translate into Sales?

Zero Parades scored 83 on Metacritic and earned recommendations from 87% of critics on OpenCritic, yet its Steam audience peaked at just over 3,000 concurrent players. Disco Elysium, by comparison, has sold roughly 4.6 million paid copies and once drew more than 8,000 players at once. The gap explains the layoffs.

GameSpot rated the game 8 out of 10, and Destructoid’s Aidan O’Brien called it “an excellent, narrative-focused RPG that embraces both self-awareness and the desire for more.” Other reviewers were warmer toward the writing than the structure. GameSpot’s own critique noted the game “tries too hard to imitate Disco Elysium,” a complaint Siliconera’s review shared.

None of that critical warmth showed up on Steam’s charts. TheGamer reported SteamDB data showing Zero Parades peaked at just over 3,000 concurrent players on PC. Disco Elysium’s remastered edition has sold roughly 4.6 million paid units since 2019 and once reached an all-time high of 8,070 concurrent players on Steam.

The wider industry offers little comfort either. Xbox has cut 1,600 jobs this year as part of a broader reset, with another 1,600 planned within twelve months, while Riot Games and Skate developer Full Circle both announced layoffs earlier in 2026.

The 2022 Split ZA/UM Never Outran

ZA/UM’s trouble with its own fans predates Zero Parades by four years. In 2022, three of Disco Elysium’s founders, Robert Kurvitz, Aleksander Rostov and Helen Hindpere, said they had been pushed out of the studio involuntarily, and accused remaining leadership of trying to keep the split quiet.

Kurvitz and Rostov sued, alleging an illegal takeover of the majority stake in the studio. ZA/UM countered that the three had fostered a toxic workplace, and separately accused Kurvitz of trying to illegally sell the studio’s intellectual property. The dispute took roughly a year to resolve.

Most of the writers and designers who built Disco Elysium’s reputation were gone from ZA/UM long before Zero Parades shipped. PC Gamer writer Ted Litchfield, who has closely followed the studio, said ahead of the game’s 2025 reveal that it would have to be spectacular to win back a hostile fanbase.

1. October 2019: ZA/UM releases Disco Elysium, which becomes a cult critical hit.
2. 2022: Founders Robert Kurvitz, Aleksander Rostov and Helen Hindpere say they were pushed out involuntarily and sue over what they call an illegal takeover of the studio.
3. 2023: The ownership dispute is resolved after roughly a year of legal exchanges.
4. October 2024: Four rival studios born from the split reveal separate Disco Elysium successor projects within hours of each other.
5. May 21, 2026: ZA/UM releases Zero Parades: For Dead Spies to strong reviews.
6. July 17, 2026: ZA/UM announces redundancy notices for up to 32 staff.

Some fans never forgave the studio for how the split played out. PC Gamer highlighted social posts arguing the core Disco Elysium audience was too alienated by the studio’s history to reward Zero Parades at all, whatever the reviews said.

Four Studios Still Chase Disco Elysium’s Crown

ZA/UM’s exodus did not just produce lawsuits. It produced four separate studios, each staffed by former Disco Elysium developers and each chasing a version of the same crown.

Kurvitz and Rostov started the first rival studio, Red Info, within weeks of their 2022 departure. The venture has drawn more than 10 million dollars in backing from NetEase and recruited veteran writer Chris Avellone, but still has not named a game.

Two more studios announced themselves on the same October day in 2024. Longdue Games, roughly a dozen developers including former Bungie and Rockstar staff, is building an untitled psychogeographic RPG. Dark Math Games, a twenty person team, later landed a seven-figure investment for its debut project, originally called XXX Nightshift.

Dark Math renamed that game Tangerine Antarctic in a November 2025 reveal, setting its detective story inside a hotel at a fictional Antarctic ski resort. Hours after Longdue and Dark Math went public, Disco Elysium writer Argo Tuulik announced a fourth studio, Summer Eternal, an explicitly worker owned collective built with fellow ZA/UM alumni Olga Moskvina, Dora Klindžić and Lenval Brown.

ZA/UM itself insisted Zero Parades was never meant to be read as a spiritual successor at all. When it revealed the game in March 2025 under the codename C4, the studio said the story and setting had no connection to Disco Elysium. Writers Siim Sinamäe and Honey Watson described it as a spy story built on the studio’s dice based skill system, not a sequel to the cop story that made ZA/UM famous.

The Unfinished Rivals Just Got a Warning

Every one of the four rival studios has spent years selling investors and fans on the idea that Disco Elysium’s formula, filtered through new hands, can still find an audience. Zero Parades was the first real test of that idea, since it came from the team with the deepest technical continuity to the original game.

The results were not encouraging. A studio with the Disco Elysium name, the underlying tools, and strong reviews still could not sell enough copies to keep its own staff employed. Four companies are still battling for the title of the studio’s true heir, and not one of them can yet point to a single sale.

Red Info has NetEase’s money and Chris Avellone’s writing behind it, but four years after forming, it still has not named its game. Longdue and the renamed Tangerine Antarctic remain unreleased too. Summer Eternal, the smallest and most ideologically driven of the four, has shown the least of all.

Zero Parades is still due on PlayStation 5 later this year, ZA/UM has said, the studio’s only remaining near-term chance to widen an audience that its own history helped shrink.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Is Zero Parades: For Dead Spies About?

Zero Parades follows Hershel Wilk, alias “Cascade,” an operative sent into the fictional city state of Portofiro on a covert mission. Like Disco Elysium’s protagonist, she has a split psyche the player argues with instead of fighting enemies directly. ZA/UM has said the story draws more on the spy novels of John le Carré than on James Bond, with added influence from Ursula K. Le Guin and Thomas Pynchon.

Are Any of Disco Elysium’s Original Writers Still at ZA/UM?

Yes, at least some remain. Even critics of the studio’s history note that developers who worked on Disco Elysium are still on staff at ZA/UM, alongside newer hires who joined after the 2022 split. The three most senior creative leads, Robert Kurvitz, Aleksander Rostov and Helen Hindpere, are not among them.

Has Disco Elysium Been Ported to Mobile?

Yes. ZA/UM brought Disco Elysium: The Final Cut to Google Play on August 5, 2025, as a visual novel style port aimed at casual players who had not tried the original PC and console release.

What Is the ZA/UM Workers’ Alliance?

It is ZA/UM’s in house labor union. The studio said in its July 17 statement that it consulted with the Alliance’s representatives throughout the redundancy process and credited the group with helping shape how the cuts were carried out.

Is There Going to Be a Real Disco Elysium 2?

Nobody has officially announced one. Kurvitz and Rostov’s studio, Red Info, has been developing an unannounced project since 2022 without confirming a title, and ZA/UM has said Zero Parades was never intended as a direct sequel or spiritual successor to Disco Elysium.