The most promising Disco Elysium successor studio says workers must unite to topple Valve's 'digital fiefdom' of Steam
According to his biographer, Max Brod, Franz Kafka once postulated over lunch that our world wasn't much more than «a bad mood of God, a bad day.» When Brod asked if, then, that meant there was room for hope—perhaps God's bad mood could end—Kafka replied «Oh, hope enough, infinite hope—just not for us.»
Which is pretty much the vibe I get from the devs at worker-owned studio Summer Eternal, one of the many Disco Elysium successor companies that popped up in the wake of ZA/UM's fracturing. In a recent chat with VG247, the devs at the studio were asked if they saw much chance of conditions in the industry improving following a devastating couple of years of layoffs. Their answer? «I think this industry is finished. But fortunately for everyone, videogames are not.»
The dev who said that was former Disco Elysium writer Dora Klindžić, and it should probably tell you something about both the state of the games industry and the general vibe at this studio in particular that hers was not the most alarming answer given by the team. Her comrade Aleksandar Gavrilović takes a more «accelerationist» view. Finally, the games industry has its own Sergei Nechaev.
«I myself ascribe to the accelerationist view that the only way to achieve better conditions is to enter crises which underline the contradictions of society and force us to remake the world,» says Gavrilović. «Now, after tens of thousands of layoffs, the time seems right for game developers to stand up for their rights against systemic greed.»
Which, I have to be honest, sounds more straightforwardly Marxist than «accelerationist» to me (and certainly not Nechaevist. That was a joke. Please do not email me to tell me I got Nechaev wrong). That society's contradictions—bourgeois vs proletarian, greedy games industry exec vs crunching dev—have to sharpen to a point that they can no longer be sustained, opening the way for change, is plain old dialectics.
Then again, maybe I'll take that back. Gavrilović says he's «eagerly
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