A Disco Elysium Expansion Has Reportedly Been Cancelled Following Staff Layoffs

thegamer.com:

Disco Elysium developer ZA/UM has gone through a few hardships in recent years, whether that be legal disputes, ownership struggles, crunch culture, or any other potential problems that have been getting in the way of the people on the ground making good games. Unfortunately, the struggles keep coming for ZA/UM, as it's been reported that the studio is going to make 24 employees redundant.

This is according to a new report from GLHF, which claims that the studio is going to lose around a quarter of its total workforce in a new round of layoffs. To make matters worse, GLHF also claims that these layoffs have come about due to the cancelation of a project codenamed X7, which is believed to be a large, standalone expansion for Disco Elysium that was "one to two years away from completion".

According to a message to staff by ZA/UM CEO Ilmar Kompus, as seen by GLHF, the majority of these layoffs will affect the team working on X7, but will also extend to people from "non-development teams and non-X7 projects". Several writers and engineers were named in a separate message as potential candidates to lose their jobs, as well as technical artists, production, IT, and animation employees.

Despite concerted efforts over the past eight months by our management team and the X7 disciplines, following consultation with our management team, I have taken the difficult decision to cancel X7. - ZA/UM CEO Ilmar Kompus

As for why X7 was canceled, it seems as though employees put it down to sheer mismanagement by higher-ups, with one source claiming that managers were "always acting like there was an enemy" and that the studio had "turned into the very thing that Disco Elysium was against". They also claim that existing talent within ZA/UM wasn't appreciated or respected and were replaced by fresh hires, while work produced by women "wasn’t as valued."

In the message from Kompus, he states that the remaining team at ZA/UM will be reshaped in order to best suit the two other games that