ZA/UM Studios to lay off up to 32 employees

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.”

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, its commercial performance has apparently not hit the mark.

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.”

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.

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ZA/UM has struggled since the launch of Disco Elysium

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 of Disco Elysium. They and other founding employees would soon found their own companies: Darkmath Games, Longdue Games, and Summer Eternal.

ZA/UM CEO Ilmar Kompus later accused game director 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 and People Make Games lent credence to the notion that both accusations might be true.

The company later laid off an undisclosed number of employees in February of 2024. Remaining workers chose to formally unionize in October 2025.

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.