ZA/UM Cuts Up to 32 Jobs After Zero Parades: For Dead Spies Sales Disappoint
ZA/UM, the studio behind Disco Elysium, has served redundancy or “at-risk” notices to up to 32 employees across all departments, just two months after launching its long-awaited follow-up, Zero Parades: For Dead Spies. The London-based studio confirmed the cuts in a statement posted to social media on July 17, blaming the game’s soft commercial showing despite a warm critical reception.
“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,” ZA/UM wrote, adding that it has “served redundancy or at-risk notices impacting up to 32 of our colleagues across all departments at ZA/UM Studio.” The studio said the departing staff’s contributions “made a lasting difference and left its mark on Zero Parades: For Dead Spies, and the studio has a whole.”
A Well-Reviewed Game That Still Underperformed
Zero Parades: For Dead Spies launched on Windows PC via Steam, GOG and Epic Games Store on May 21, 2026, released for Windows on 21 May 2026, with a PlayStation 5 version planned for later in the year. The isometric espionage RPG casts players as Hershel Wilk, codenamed CASCADE, a disgraced operative recalled to the fictional city-state of Portofiro five years after a catastrophic mission failure.
Despite being priced at $39.99 on Steam, the game reviewed solidly, sitting at 83 on Metacritic according to GameSpot’s own coverage, and received an 8/10 in GameSpot’s Zero Parades: For Dead Spies review and an 83 score on Metacritic. It is currently rated “Very Positive” by players on Steam. Yet reviews were more divided than those for Disco Elysium, with some critics finding its spy-focused structure a less natural fit for the systems ZA/UM originally built for a detective story.
Studio Says It Continues to Work With the ZA/UM Workers’ Alliance
ZA/UM said it is not simply cutting staff and moving on. “Throughout this difficult process, we have continued to consult and work with representatives of the ZA/UM Workers’ Alliance,” the studio wrote on Bluesky. The company also urged other developers to reach out directly, telling “anyone currently hiring, please consider the colleagues leaving ZA/UM.”
The studio framed the restructuring as a change in scale rather than direction, stating that “this changes the shape of ZA/UM, but not its purpose. Our artistic standards remain unchanged: we will persist.”
A Studio Still Living in Disco Elysium’s Shadow
The layoffs land on top of years of turmoil at ZA/UM that predate Zero Parades entirely. Following the 2019 release of Disco Elysium, the studio’s co-creators, game director Robert Kurvitz and art director Aleksander Rostov, departed the company amid a bitter falling-out. According to Game Developer, 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.
Several other founding staff subsequently left to start their own studios, and 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, who and other founding employees would soon found their own companies: Darkmath Games, Longdue Games, and Summer Eternal. Independent reporting at the time from outlets including Gamesindustry.biz and People Make Games suggested both sides of the dispute carried some truth.
Up to a Third of the Studio Affected
The scale of the cuts is significant relative to ZA/UM’s size. At the time of the earlier dispute, the union reported that ZA/UM employed roughly 100 people across the globe, and if that number held constant through the launch of Zero Parades, today’s layoffs would account for around one-third of the company’s staff. ZA/UM’s own website has separately described the studio as having grown into a global team of nearly 100 writers, artists, engineers and producers since its 2015 founding.
The cuts also arrive amid a brutal year for the wider industry. GameSpot noted that Xbox let go of 1,600 staffers as part of its “reset” earlier this month, with another 1,600 planned to get laid off in the next 12 months, while Skate studio Full Circle was also hit with layoffs in February 2026, as was 2XKO developer Riot Games in the same month.
For Australian and New Zealand fans who backed Disco Elysium‘s cult following into a second outing, the layoffs underline how thin the margin has become for narrative-heavy CRPGs to sustain a full-sized studio even after critical acclaim. With a PlayStation 5 version of Zero Parades: For Dead Spies still slated for later this year, how ZA/UM’s smaller team manages that launch, and whatever comes after it, will be closely watched by the genre’s local following.
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