ZA/UM, the game studio best known for Disco Elysium, has announced layoffs affecting up to 32 employees across all departments. The reason: weak sales of its espionage role-playing game Zero Parades: For Dead Spies, which launched in May. The studio shared the news on its Bluesky social media account (Engadget; ZA/UM on Bluesky).

Affected employees have been served redundancy or at-risk notices. The announcement came about two months after the game shipped. ZA/UM said the decision was directly tied to the game's disappointing sales (Engadget).

The numbers back that up. Zero Parades reached a peak of 3,177 concurrent players on Steam, according to SteamDB figures cited by Engadget. That means at the busiest moment, fewer than 3,200 people were playing the game at the same time. In the PC gaming world, that peak is a common shorthand for how well a game sold around launch, especially for story-driven games where most buyers show up close to release day. For a studio with the costs of a full development team, 3,177 is well short of what a new game needs to sustain its staff (Engadget).

ZA/UM said it is consulting with the ZA/UM Workers' Alliance, a union that represents staff at the studio, as it carries out the layoffs (Engadget; ZA/UM on Bluesky).

The cuts span every department, which suggests the studio is shrinking as a whole rather than trimming a single team. When layoffs hit all areas at once, the usual reason is that a company is lowering its overall spending to match a new, smaller budget, not shifting focus to a different project. The exact number of remaining staff has not been shared.

The peak player count of 3,177 does not capture every sale the game will ever make. Discounts and releases on other platforms can bring in more money over time. But the launch peak sets the direction, and for a game that likely took years to build, 3,177 is a low starting point.

One thing worth noting is how ZA/UM is handling the layoffs. In some countries, employers are legally required to consult a union before cutting jobs. But ZA/UM has gone public about working with the ZA/UM Workers' Alliance, which is more openness than many game studios offer. It also means the terms of the layoffs, severance pay, and timelines could be shaped by collective discussion rather than management deciding everything alone, though the details have not been made public.

The timing follows a pattern seen across the games industry. Studios usually wait until the initial launch period ends and sales numbers settle before making staffing decisions tied to a game's performance. Two months is on the fast side of that window, suggesting ZA/UM moved quickly once it was clear Zero Parades was not catching on.

For the people affected, the impact is immediate. Up to 32 roles across all departments means engineers, artists, writers, producers, and operations staff are all affected. The spread of the cuts raises a practical question about what ZA/UM can build afterward, and whether the studio can take on a full-scale project with fewer people. The company has not commented on what comes next.

What remains is a studio shrinking to match what it can actually earn. The union involvement and the public Bluesky post at least give the process more visibility than is typical in industry layoffs. Whether Zero Parades picks up sales over time, or whether ZA/UM can settle into its smaller size, will depend on things the studio has not yet spoken about publicly.