According to unconfirmed reports, about a quarter of the entire team will have to look for work.
In the ZA/UM studio, which gave us Disco Elysium, things have been going crazy over the last few years. New projects and expansions for Elysium itself are being canceled, and staff cuts are also being made. Cunning insiders were the first to sniff out that the team would be significantly reduced, but now they were directly confirmed by the management of ZA/UM.
Representatives of the studio did not specify how many people will have to look for a new job, but noted that this is a natural process in conditions when a new project is canceled and such a high number of staff is no longer necessary.
This week it became known that ZA/UM noted a major standalone expansion for Disco Elysium, which was being developed under the working title X7. We don’t know any details about the addon; All that is known is that before its completion the team still had to work and work for one to two years. In other words, the developers canceled the project because it began to outgrow the main game, despite the fact that add-ons, according to statistics, always sell worse than the original product for which they were intended.
Perhaps in the future, based on the developments made in relation to the addon, ZA/UM will release something integral and not related to Disco Elysium, but for now this is just a guess. No one has yet informed us about the team’s future plans.