Pirating this game is probably the most ethical way to play it
this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2025
78 points (97.6% liked)
Disco Elysium
684 readers
19 users here now
A community for Disco Elysium, the isometric detective RPG.
Main instance rules apply.
Discussion related to Disco Elysium, the creatives behind it and any related media is welcome.
Please tag posts involving major spoilers with the NSFW tab and use the spoiler ⚠button to hide them in comments.
eg.
spoiler
Mr Evrart is helping me find my gun
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Unless you bought it when it came out, it’s now the only ethical way to play it.
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.
Why look a gift horse in the mouth???
Basically, giving something away for free that would normally have a cost is a market manipulation tactic. Epic does this as a means to draw customers away from their competition, primarily Valve, thereby reinforcing their position in the capitalist market.
They're not drawing me anywhere. I made the mistake of buying something on there once and was dismayed to find that the updates for the game that had been available on Steam for months just weren't applied to Epic.
Now I just grab all the free stuff which is usually a bit older and thus fully updated anyway.
Does Epic pay the full amount to the game publisher per copy when they give away free games, or does it work some other way?