this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2025
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Disco Elysium
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Mr Evrart is helping me find my gun
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OOTL casual scroller - what happened?
ZA/UM was an artist-owned cooperative studio.
But then an investor fraudulently obtained financial control over the company, forced out the original leaders, and out-lawyered them. Now it's just another corporate game studio, and neither the lead writer, the lead programmer, nor the art director of Disco Elysium works there anymore.
shoot, tried the game through my brother's free epic copy and then bought it for myself thinking it was so good that I had to give it back to the studio. It was on sale for 5€, but still I feel uneasy now..
At least one advantage of epic's shenanigans is that I'd probably never have played this game if the free giveaway had not happened.
I only know so much, something about switching dev teams/ownership and screwing the original devs but I found an article that claims to know the whole thing.
https://80.lv/articles/truth-behind-firing-disco-elysium-developers-za-um-s-canceled-sequel
to save anyone reading this: basically it's big business boys trying to rat fuck each other with a series of sneaky business moves to acquire shares or maintain operational control... at the expense of creative efforts and next projects. So some (presumably nice, innocent) people got fucked over by corporate greed at the expense of art but likely someone got rich off it.