ZA/UM has announced a round of layoffs today after the studio's latest game, Zero Parades: For Dead Spies, failed to perform commercially. The studio is best known for developing the 2019 narrative role-playing game Disco Elysium.
The studio made the announcement in a post on Bluesky. ZA/UM says that while Zero Parades was released to critical acclaim, it's "commercial performance has not enabled us to sustain a studio of our current size. As a result, the studio has served redundancy and at-risk notices to 32 employees across all departments. Their work has made a lasting difference and left its mark on Zero Parades: For Dead Spies, and the studio as a whole," the announcement reads.
ZA/UM also says that during this process it has consulted with representatives from the studio's union, ZA/UM Workers' Alliance. While the layoffs will change the landscape of the studio, ZA/UM says it will not change its purpose: "We will persist." ZA/UM previously conducted layoffs in 2024, affecting up to 24 workers.
Zero Parades: For Dead Spies released this May as the highly anticipated follow-up to Disco Elysium. The espionage RPG retained much of the same narrative and mechanical hallmarks of the studio's debut title. Here's what we said about it in our review:
Zero Parades is an absolutely absorbing mystery that lies somewhere in the cross-section between geopolitical thriller, comedy of errors, and humanist tragedy. When it’s not trying too hard to retrace Disco Elysium’s signature, Zero Parades excels as a complicated story of a perpetual fuck-up desperately searching for redemption.
ZA/UM has itself been the subject of much controversy and discussion in the years since Disco Elysium's release. In 2021, a number of Disco Elysium's key creatives (including lead designer Robert Kurvitz) were ousted from the studio. This set in motion a series of legal battles, reports, and documentaries trying to unravel the story of what actually happened. The saga is ongoing, and it only seems to get more complicated with time. Zero Parades' development and release were enveloped by this controversy. Many fans saw buying the game and supporting ZA/UM's current leadership as a betrayal of the ousted employees. A PlayStation 5 version of Zero Parades is supposedly set to release sometime later this year.
Papers Please is such a strange game, because the mechanics make no real sense, you're a border control officer for a brutal police state that inexplicably has huge numbers of people desperate to immigrate to, and you constantly have to push away otherwise good people because your paycheck is on the line if you break the rules, and your paycheck is always so meager that you have to choose between giving your family enough to eat or being able to pay the heating bill.
It's like, the most American sort of setting I can think of for a game, but they said, nah, this is communism actually.
That's part of why I said "1984 of video games," because 1984 is taking a job as a Beitish propagandist and going "nah, this is communism actually".
While Papers Please lines up in some respects with Berlin Wall mythology, it's success surely comes in part from how it reflects well-known evils of America but it just assigns it inexplicably to communism.
A lot of its clones do the same thing, like literally a very recent one is about a brutal, bureaucratic job market that yeah, you can compare it to China if you want, but clearly the relative success of the game is mainly westerners whose own job markets are dehumanizing bullshit. But it's communism but without the free housing.
It's a version of communism that was sold to Americans by American propagandists. Remember that they can't show communism as something that ensures the basics for all. One, they need it to be relatable, and two, they need it to be (on average) worse than the average conditions in a failing American state.
So you get this nonsense version of communism that removes everyone's agency and forces them into virtually unpaid slave labor for a fat cat commie boss. A version that only makes sense when you realize that it's showing the condition of the American lower working class. Something that many people recognize and hate, or have spent their lives seeing as antithesis of the American Dream.
This is how liberals think the Berlin wall was, and it makes sense when you consider that Germans would have family on both sides.