controversy

“I think the workers at ZA/UM all agree that we have something unique at the studio that we want to preserve for years to come.” Marketing manager Poppy Ingham handles social and communications for the studio behind politics-laden RPG Disco Elysium. Today, though, she’s speaking on behalf of the ZA/UM Workers’ Alliance – a new union set up to represent a subset of UK-based employees at the company.

“The more I’ve worked here, the more I’ve realised that what we have is a unique makeup of people, and the union is a large effort to solidify that,” says UI/UX designer and fellow union rep Declan Keane. “Instead of thinking about what the next year will look like, we’ll be working together, taking what we’ve learned already and doubling down on that. I want to play the games that this team makes.”

Declan Keane

Staff protection isn’t an abstract issue for ZA/UM employees, who lost around two dozen colleagues to layoffs early last year – approximately a quarter of the studio’s staff at the time. The redundancies followed the cancellation of a standalone expansion for Disco Elysium, the beloved detective story which first made ZA/UM’s name.

“Any project cancellation is devastating,” Ingham says. “Especially when, at that time, we were a small studio.” During the redundancies, Ingham estimates that ZA/UM was made up of between 40 and 60 staff. Today, it’s around 90. “So we were a very close-knit team.”

The committee that established the union did so to help staff feel safe and comfortable in their jobs. “That’s the main reason,” Ingham says. “We can exercise our legal rights should we need to. But mostly so we can try and have the studio work as a collaborative project between the workers and management. We like being here. We want to continue being here. So let’s try and get a seat at the table in the big management meetings.”

People power

The Independent Workers Union of Great Britain (IWGB) represents the new ZA/UM initiative. “However, our meetings are completely open to our other colleagues who might be based and employed by our Porto arm or our Tallinn arm, for example,” Ingham says. “So although we can only exercise legal protection for UK workers, we can still bring in other workers from around the world to feed in on what we’re doing.”

Poppy Ingham

In its recognition agreement, ZA/UM’s management has agreed to inform, consult, and negotiate with the union on key issues – like changes to pay, pensions, working hours, and holiday entitlement. “A lot of stuff to ensure the general safety and care of employees,” Ingham says. “We haven’t had to have any super difficult negotiations yet, but obviously in the future, it gives us that protection if we want to get down to the nitty gritty.”

When GDC released its annual State of Games Industry survey in January, it found that one in ten developers were laid off in 2024. “We believe a lot of that is because of the low collective bargaining power that workers have,” Ingham says. “In our case, we’ve had a couple of project cancellations and one set of redundancies. But I think the people who unfortunately did leave the company spurred us on to continue doing this, and put the fire in our bellies to push us over the line.”

That fire has fuelled the founders of the ZA/UM Workers’ Alliance over the year it’s taken to get the project up and running, including six months of intense work during the recognition process. “God forbid anything like [the layoffs] happens in the future,” Ingham says. “But if it did, we have that collective bargaining power.”

For Ingham, the aim is larger than protecting ZA/UM. “We were seeing cancellations and redundancies all over the industry,” she says. “So we really want to try and pave the way for other folks as well.”

Chequered history

It’s true that layoffs have wracked countless studios in recent years. But any discussion of worker issues at ZA/UM is received in a uniquely charged atmosphere. That’s thanks in part to Disco Elysium itself – the overtly political themes of which encouraged players to consider their relationship to companies and capital. And it’s partly the result of the acrimonious ousting of leading creative figures at the studio.

In an open letter to fans published in 2022, Disco Elysium game director Robert Kurvitz and art director Aleksander Rostov claimed that ZA/UM’s new owners had taken control of the company through fraud, pushing them out in the process. Meanwhile, ZA/UM CEO Ilmar Kompus accused Kurvitz and Rostov of creating a toxic environment, “intending to steal IP”, and “belittling women and co-workers”.

“It would be very short-sighted of a growing international company to tolerate such behaviour,” Kompus told the Estonian newspaper Estonian Ekspress, as translated by Google.

Disco Elysium | Image credit: ZA/UM

Since then, a cottage industry has emerged to provide commentary, explanation, and interpretation of ZA/UM’s troubles and controversies. “It’s been a super turbulent couple of years,” Ingham says. “Oh God, you’d open Slack and you wouldn’t know if you were expecting to see another podcast about the studio. You had no idea what was going to happen.”

A pair of journalistic documentaries by People Make Games, in particular, have shifted public opinion, encouraging empathy toward the staff who still work at ZA/UM. But the team now working on the espionage RPG Zero Parades: For Dead Spies has faced years of hostility – the dark side of fan support for Kurvitz, Rostov, and other key members of the original Disco Elysium team who are no longer part of the studio.

“I guess I can offer perspective because I’m the comms manager,” Ingham says. “The thing is, when people are telling us to go kill ourselves, I’m the person reading that. Or when people are saying, ‘Fuck management,’ I’m the person reading that. Management aren’t the ones reading that. We talk about the fans valuing workers, but the abuse they’re sending comes to the workers.”

“Recognising a union was core to our values as a studio”

Ed Tomaszewski, ZA/UM

Private Division co-founder Ed Tomaszewski was appointed as ZA/UM’s president in 2022.

“When we heard that the workforce was having discussions about unionising, what we did as a management team was come together to talk about that,” he says. “And when we did talk about it, it was clear that recognising a union was core to our values as a studio, to be providing fair working practices.”

Tomaszewski is keen to point out that, before union recognition, ZA/UM had already implemented 35-hour work weeks for UK staff, comprehensive Bupa private health insurance, £600 monthly childcare support, dedicated mental health resources through Oliva, up to 30 days of paid leave, “industry leading” parental leave, individual learning and development budgets, and an employee-led diversity committee. The company has also set up an employee stock option plan which distributes over 20% of company shares to staff globally.

“When we sat down for our first discussion [with the union], I was prepared to hear, ‘OK, here are all the problems at ZA/UM, and this is how a union is going to fix them, from a UK perspective,'” Tomaszewski says. “And what I was pleasantly surprised to hear was actually, ‘Things are not bad here. We have it pretty good, but let’s work together to make it even better.'”

Zero Parades: For Dead Spies | Image credit: ZA/UM

Since 2019, three ZA/UM games have been cancelled – a Disco Elysium sequel, a sci-fi RPG, and the aforementioned expansion that ended in layoffs. Does Tomaszewski understand why that might look like mismanagement?

“After the success of Disco Elysium and the energy that came from it, not only did the team think that they could do anything, but they thought they could do everything and all at once,” he says. “And so this was, I would say, a painful lesson for the studio to learn, where we got a better sense of what we were able to achieve as we moved along, but had to make painful decisions along the way.”

In the cases of those first two project cancellations, ZA/UM was in a financial position to simply move team members onto other projects. “However, with the latest cancellation, and given the financial realities of being an independent studio, we were not able to continue with a part of the team, which was around 20 individuals, give or take,” Tomaszewski says. “We did have to make the difficult decision to go through a period of redundancies there.”

Tomaszewski acknowledges that those layoffs made it difficult for remaining staff at ZA/UM to feel safe in their jobs. “I think in combination with that and the industry turmoil that was happening at the time and layoffs happening seemingly every day,” he says.

“I think all of that was a combination of bringing in some unease. And I think what initially helped was that a fairly large number of our employees going through that redundancy had union representation during those consultation meetings. So while we did not have a voluntarily recognised union, there still was union representation, which we felt was very helpful throughout that whole process.”

Differing points of view

A former principal writer on the cancelled standalone expansion, Dora Klindžić, told Sports Illustrated’s GLHF last year that “the mask has slipped from the face of capital.”

“What remains at ZA/UM is a cold, careless company where managers wage war against their own creatives,” she went on. “Where artistry is second to property, and where corporate strategy is formed by an arrogant disdain for their own audience.”

It’s not a characterisation of the company that Tomaszewski recognises. “Nor do I believe that current staff believe that as well, from the discussions that we’ve had with them,” he says. “Change is hard, and not everyone’s journey continues together. We do respect those who contributed to our past while we continue to build our future. But to answer your question, no, I don’t recognise that characterisation of our studio.”

Zero Parades: For Dead Spies | Image credit: ZA/UM

Ingham can’t personally relate to the way Klindžić describes ZA/UM. “That is not the studio that I’ve been working at for nearly four years,” she says. “And I wouldn’t want to comment on Dora’s lived-in experience, because it’s very, very different to my experience.”

Tomaszewski hopes that, in the future, ZA/UM will prove that it can both respect workers’ rights and push creative boundaries. “I, just like the rest of the team, want ZA/UM to be where the best creative talent wants to work, where they know they’ll be heard, where they’ll be valued and that they can do their best work,” he says. “And we believe that Zero Parades will be the proof point in that, where it is being created by a team that feels secure and empowered.”

Ingham says that the energy around unionising has given the team a boost in morale, and a sense of momentum.

“The hope for the future of ZA/UM is just to continue what we’re doing, but in a very secure and comfortable position now that we have the union established,” she says. “And to really challenge the studio and the studio’s management in the best way possible, to make sure that we’re putting ZA/UM out there as the best place to work in the industry – we take care of our staff, we have a union to push the things that we require, and we can preserve the talent that we have here.”

“The lack of collective bargaining power is definitely a part of the issues we’re seeing with the wider industry,” Keane says. “And we can fix that, and as an industry, do better. Hopefully, other people can look to us and think, if they can do it, so can we.”

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