{"id":806778,"date":"2026-07-17T20:21:09","date_gmt":"2026-07-17T20:21:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/806778\/"},"modified":"2026-07-17T20:21:09","modified_gmt":"2026-07-17T20:21:09","slug":"za-um-studios-to-lay-off-up-to-32-employees","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/806778\/","title":{"rendered":"ZA\/UM Studios to lay off up to 32 employees"},"content":{"rendered":"

Zero Parades: For Dead Spies and Disco Elysium developer ZA\/UM Studio has filed redundancy paperwork that will see the company potentially lay off up to 32 employees across “all departments.”<\/p>\n

This news comes from the company’s social media accounts, where it posted a statement that concluded with an appeal for other developers to consider hiring the impacted workers. The post states that while Zero Parades was released to positive reviews<\/a>, its commercial performance has apparently not hit the mark.<\/p>\n

As ZA\/UM put it: “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.”<\/p>\n

The post says the laid-off employees’ work has “made a lasting difference” and “left its mark” on Zero Parades and the studio as a whole, and that the company is continuing to consult and work with representatives of the ZA\/UM Workers’ Alliance<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Related:Todd Howard says ‘the timing is right’ for a collaboration with Obsidian<\/a><\/p>\n

ZA\/UM has struggled since the launch of Disco Elysium<\/p>\n

These post-launch layoffs are the latest in a years-long string of hits for the studio that began with the ouster of two co-creators<\/a> of Disco Elysium. They and other founding employees would soon found their own companies<\/a>: Darkmath Games, Longdue Games, and Summer Eternal<\/a>.<\/p>\n

ZA\/UM CEO Ilmar Kompus later accused game director <\/a>Robert Kurvitz and art director Aleksander Rostov of fostering a toxic work environment, while the pair insisted they were fired by executives solely focused on corporate greed. Sources speaking to Gamesindustry.biz<\/a> and People Make Games <\/a>lent credence to the notion that both accusations might be true.<\/p>\n

The company later laid off an undisclosed number of employees in February of 2024<\/a>. Remaining workers chose to formally unionize in October 2025<\/a>.<\/p>\n

At the time, the union reported that ZA\/UM employed roughly 100 people across the globe. If that number held constant through the launch of Zero Parades, that would mean today’s layoffs account for around one-third of the company’s staff.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Zero Parades: For Dead Spies and Disco Elysium developer ZA\/UM Studio has filed redundancy paperwork that will see…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":806779,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[64,63,105],"class_list":["post-806778","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/806778","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=806778"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/806778\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/806779"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=806778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=806778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=806778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}