Engadget41%
ZA/UM announces layoffs two months after the launch of Zero Parades 74%
By Jackson Chen42%
7/18/2026, 5:55:18 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 14 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Ambiguity (Equivocation), and Recency Bias, with Unattributed Quote as the most egregious example at 40.6% saturation with 95 hits. Analysis detected 393 faulty-reasoning hits from 234 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 67.4% and a BS Rank of 74% (4,746 of 18,284 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 74.00% of the article peer group.
Layoffs in the video game industry just keep coming.
In a post on social media, ZA/UM Studio, the developer and publisher of Disco Elysium and more recently, Zero Parades: For Dead Spies, announced that it "served redundancy or at-risk notices impacting up to 32 of our colleagues across all departments at ZA/UM Studio."
The news of the layoffs comes only a few months after the studio's latest game was released in May.
ZA/UM Studio attributed the layoffs to the weak "commercial performance" of Zero Parades: For Dead Spies, which "has not enabled us to sustain a studio of our current size."
According to SteamDB, the espionage RPG hit an all-time peak of 3,177 players around the time of its release, but has steadily declined since.
For diehard Disco Elysium fans, the news of layoffs may not come as a total surprise.
After the success of the narrative-heavy RPG in 2019, ZA/UM Studio went through a series of conflicts including the firing of the game's core team, a lawsuit involving intellectual property theft and accusations of a hostile work environment for women.
Former devs with ZA/UM Studio subsequently made their own studio called Longdue, which is also working on a "narrative-first" game.
As for the latest layoffs, ZA/UM Studio said it's still "continued to consult and work with representatives of the ZA/UM Workers' Alliance."
Analysis
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