Disco Elysium Standalone Expansion Reportedly Cancelled, ZA/UM Facing Layoffs | Push Square
Developer ZA/UM reportedly cancelled a standalone expansion to Disco Elysium back in 2022, said to be «one to two years away from completion» then, and the third project in as many years to be consigned to the endless void. Now, roughly a quarter of the studio is facing redundancy, which makes us want to put on sad disco music and contemplate the grim, seemingly inevitable fate that awaits all video game developers.
That's according to Swedish gaming content agency GLHF (thanks, Eurogamer), which claims that the cancelled expansion, codenamed X7, was the third such shuttering, with two other unnamed projects also being cancelled or put on ice indefinitely. If that wasn't bad enough, GLHF, citing «sources close to the matter», claims some 24 employees are facing redundancy. That's roughly a quarter of the studio's entire headcount, most of whom were reportedly on the X7 team. ZA/UM will instead refocus around two other in-development projects, known as C4 and M0 internally.
This sorry news follows years of messy, public legal spats between the creatives behind Disco Elysium and the suits who funded the thing. It's hard not to see the irony of it all; Disco Elysium deals with the death of art and artist expression in the face of grinding corporate interests and the futility of fighting against the inevitable. It's depressing stuff, but that's the world we live in and what inspired Revachol in the first place.
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Can you believe we exist in a timeline in which a Disco Elysium expansion is seemingly cancelled out of hand? Is there any more relentlessly bleak RPG you can think of in recent years? Let us know in the comments section below.
Khayl Adam is the second best video game journalist Australia has ever produced, and his ambitions of world domination have (thus far) been curbed by the twin siren songs of strategy games and CRPGs. He has always felt an affinity for the noble dachshund, the best
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