Up to 32 employees were affected by the studio’s recent decision.
Layoffs in the video game industry keep happening. In a social media post, ZA/UM Studio, the developer and publisher of Disco Elysée and more recently, Zero parades: for dead spiesannounced that it had “sent notices of dismissal or risk affecting up to 32 of our colleagues in all departments of ZA/UM Studio”.
News of the layoffs comes just months after the release of the studio’s latest game in May. ZA/UM Studio attributed these layoffs to the poor “commercial performance” of Zero Parades: for dead spies, which “did not allow us to support a studio of our current size”. According to SteamDB, the spy RPG reached an all-time high of 3,177 players at the time of its release, but has been steadily declining since.
For the diehards Disco Elysée fans, the news of the layoffs may not come as a complete surprise. After the success of the narrative RPG in 2019, ZA/UM Studio went through a series of conflicts, including the firing of the game’s core team, a lawsuit for intellectual property theft, and accusations of a hostile work environment for women. The former ZA/UM Studio developers later created their own studio called Longdue, which is also working on a “narrative-first” game. As for the latest layoffs, the ZA/UM studio said it “continues to consult and work with representatives of the ZA/UM Workers’ Alliance.”
