ZA/UM Studio has started a restructuring that could affect as many as 32 staff. The company behind Disco Elysium said its new game, Zero Parades: For Dead Spies, didn’t sell well enough to keep the studio at its current size.
Important detail first: these are redundancy or “at-risk” notices, not confirmed job cuts. The consultation process may not be finished, and the final number of people leaving could be lower than 32.
The notices reportedly cover employees across all departments, which points to a studio-wide shake-up rather than cuts in one team.
The studio said it’s consulting with the ZA/UM Workers’ Alliance, the workers’ organization at the company. It hasn’t said whether the Alliance agrees with the business reasons or is pushing to reduce the number of redundancies.
This isn’t ZA/UM’s first period of trouble. The studio has also been locked in a long, public dispute with former Disco Elysium creative leaders over their departures, corporate control, and rights tied to the setting. Both sides have disputed each other’s accounts.
Some longtime fans said they avoided Zero Parades because of that history. But there’s no public sales data showing how much that sentiment actually affected the game’s performance. Genre, bugs, platform availability, marketing reach, and price could all play a part.
The cuts land during a rough stretch for the whole industry, which has shed tens of thousands of jobs since 2023 through closures, cancellations, and cost-cutting. Narrative-heavy games are especially hard to fund, since they need heavy writing, localization, and voice work while appealing to a smaller audience.
