ZA/UM Cuts Up to 32 Jobs Two Months After Zero Parades Launch

ZA/UM Studio announced up to 32 layoffs this week, roughly two months after releasing Zero Parades: For Dead Spies on May 21, 2026. The studio said the cuts hit "all departments" and blamed the game's "commercial performance," which it said "has not enabled us to sustain a studio of our current size," according to a statement posted on the studio's X account and reported by Engadget, IGN, TheGamer, and VGTimes.

The numbers back that up. Zero Parades peaked at 3,177 concurrent players around launch according to SteamDB, cited by Engadget, and has declined steadily since. VGTimes put the peak slightly higher at "just over 3,200" concurrent users. Either way, that's a rounding error compared to what a Disco Elysium follow-up might have drawn from a studio with this pedigree.

It's not a reviews problem. Zero Parades landed an 83 on Metacritic, according to IGN and VGTimes, which counts as solid critical reception for an isometric, text-heavy RPG. ZA/UM's own statement noted the game launched to "critical acclaim." The problem was getting people to actually buy and play it.

Why buyers stayed away

TheGamer's framing gets at the core issue directly: years of "corporate drama" turned Zero Parades into what the outlet called "a poisoned chalice" before it ever launched. ZA/UM has been a mess since October 2022, when core Disco Elysium developers including writer and designer Robert Kurvitz, writer Helen Hindpere, and art and design lead Aleksander Rostov left the studio under disputed circumstances, according to IGN.

Weeks after that, Kurvitz sued the company. He and Rostov alleged that Ilmar Kompus and Tõnis Haavel of Tütreke OÜ obtained control of ZA/UM "by fraud," IGN reported. ZA/UM denied the claims and made its own counter-accusations in a statement to GamesIndustry.biz. None of those allegations have resulted in a public court ruling or settlement disclosed in current reporting, so they remain contested claims from both sides, not established fact.

The fallout scattered talent across the industry. Former ZA/UM developers went on to found Dark Math Games and Longdue Games, which announced their own projects, XXX Nightshift and Hopetown, in October 2024, according to IGN. A third outfit, Summer Eternal, emerged shortly after. Engadget also noted Longdue is working on a "narrative-first" game, positioning it as a spiritual successor for players who felt ZA/UM's remaining team couldn't recapture what made Disco Elysium work.

Not the studio's first round of cuts

This isn't ZA/UM's first layoff. IGN reported that around 24 employees were affected in 2024, in an announcement that also confirmed a standalone Disco Elysium expansion had been canceled. So this is the second significant workforce reduction in about two years, on top of the leadership exodus and litigation.

ZA/UM says it's continuing to "consult and work with representatives of the ZA/UM Workers' Alliance" throughout what it called a "difficult process," according to Engadget and IGN. The studio's statement also insisted the cuts will change "the shape of ZA/UM, but not its purpose," adding: "Our artistic standards remain unchanged: we will persist." It closed by asking anyone hiring to "consider the colleagues leaving ZA/UM."

What's next

VGTimes reported that ZA/UM still plans to bring Zero Parades: For Dead Spies to PlayStation 5 before the end of 2026, raising the open question of whether a console release can meaningfully move sales for a game that's already lost most of its PC player base. Given the concurrent player counts SteamDB tracked at launch, that's a steep hill to climb.

The layoffs land in an industry that's already shed tens of thousands of jobs since 2023 across studios large and small. ZA/UM's case is distinct only because the underlying asset, Disco Elysium, remains one of the most acclaimed RPGs of the last decade.