Studio ZA/UM is laying off staff just two months after releasing Zero Parades to critical acclaim

ZA/UM, the studio behind Disco Elysium, has issued redundancy and at-risk notices to up to 32 employees across all departments, citing the poor commercial performance of Zero Parades: For Dead Spies. The game launched in May 2026 to strong reviews but has attracted only a fraction of the audience the studio needed to sustain its current size.

The details:

• ZA/UM confirmed it served redundancy or at-risk notices to up to 32 staff across all departments, stating that Zero Parades' "commercial performance has not enabled us to sustain a studio of our current size." The studio acknowledged the game launched to critical acclaim.
• Zero Parades: For Dead Spies peaked at just 3,177 concurrent players on Steam around launch, a figure that has declined steadily since. For context, Disco Elysium peaked at over 27,000 concurrent players on release in 2019.
• The irony has not been lost on observers. Zero Parades is a game about people forced into impossible situations by systems beyond their control, and Kotaku noted that the studio framing sales disappointment as something that left the team with no choice echoes the game's own themes.
• ZA/UM has had a turbulent history well beyond its commercial struggles. In 2022, three of the studio's original founders, Robert Kurvitz, Aleksander Rostov, and Helen Hindpere, revealed they had been pushed out "involuntarily." All three have since formed separate studios to continue making games in the spirit of Disco Elysium.
• These are not the studio's first layoffs. ZA/UM has repeatedly contracted since Disco Elysium's success, and the latest cuts raise serious questions about its ability to continue operating at any meaningful scale.