Fans Criticize ZA/UM's Celebration of Disco Elysium's Birthday
"You literally fired those who made the game and want us to thank."
Over the past decade, there's been no shortage of controversies in the gaming community, ranging from reasonable and understandable to utterly insane and baseless to everything in between. The one you're going to read about today might at first seem to take the cake as the most unexpected and weird one, but it quickly starts to make sense once the proper context is provided.
ZA/UM
On October 15, Disco Elysium, the iconic 2019 role-playing game and one of the few modern-era titles that one could call a "true RPG" rather than an open-world action-adventure masquerading as one, celebrated its sixth anniversary, with the studio behind it, ZA/UM, commemorating the milestone with a Twitter post thanking "all who made it possible."
What should have been a routine celebration – just a studio marking the birthday of the game that put them on the map – quickly drew a wave of criticism, with the post's comment section containing almost no responses sharing in ZA/UM's excitement.
For those uninitiated, a studio being lambasted simply for celebrating an anniversary might seem baffling, however, a number of comments, along with a Community Note added later, explained why: it was the company's "Thank you to all who made it possible" remark, and the difficult experiences many of those "all" faced in the years following the game's release.
You see, back in 2022, Disco Elysium's key developers – Lead Designer Robert Kurvitz, Writer Helen Hindpere, and Lead Artist Aleksander Rostov – all left the company in an "involuntary manner". Shortly after, ZA/UM explained their dismissals by claiming the employees were fostering a toxic environment and attempting to illegally sell ZA/UM's IP, while Disco Elysium's former editor Martin Luiga stated they were fired on false premises.
Considering this, along with the company laying off around 25% of its workforce in 2024, the community's reaction to ZA/UM encouraging people to thank the devs makes more sense, and the fact that most of the top comments point out the disconnect between the studio's message and its previous actions no longer seems entirely unsubstantiated.
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