ZA/UM and Disco Elysium 2 screwed?

[JAB]

Looks so, get some investors in to keep the company running and then let
them fire the people who made the company a success in the first place.
Oh well, I'll always have Disco Elysium.

[Spalls Hurgenson]

Not being familiar with the story, I had to google it.

Presumably your comment is in response to this:
https://medium.com/@martinluiga/the-dissolution-of-the-za-um-cultural-association-779788390a03
(or the story about the post here:
https://www.ign.com/articles/key-members-of-disco-elysium-developer-zaum-have-left-the-company-in-an-involuntary-manner
)

Unfortunately, details of what led to this are rather lacking and
one-sided. "Imagine a kleptomaniac, if you will," Martin Luiga [an
editor who worked on Disco Elysium] said. "Only that instead of
stealing, say, 'A Lolly pop,' they take pains to manipulate dozens of
people to steal, in the end, from themselves, just because they happen
to be very proficient in that kind of an operation." Without more
information, I'm hesitant to cast blame on one side or the other.

While he doesn't paint the investors in a good light, he also admits
that they were crucial to getting the game out at all. And the sad
fact of the matter is that most developers (and artists in general)
are terrible at business, and often lock themselves into contracts
without fully understanding what they are signing themselves up to.
(in fairness, a lot of C-levels often also seem to have only a basic
understanding of business too ;-). But it's easy to paint investors as
'the bad guys' when all their primary interest is more in making money
than making games.

And anyway, I can't see this turnover as necessarily a bad thing.
Sure, it means that the team won't be making Disco Elysium 2, but on
the other hand, with new blood comes new ideas and I always favor new
IPs rather than just rehashing the old. Presumably the developers
didn't walk away empty handed - they made a successful game and
hopefully got paid adequately for their work - so it's not a loss on
their end.

(As said, the story I found is remarkably deficient on details. If
there is evidence the devs were cheated out of pay or something like
that, that's a different story, but Luiga's comments don't seem to
indicate that).

Long story short: I'm going to wait for more details.

[JAB]

I'm not sure that I'd put the investors in the 'bad guys' category but
instead the people who really where the driving force behind the game
especially in terms of the setting are no longer there. That setting was
developed over many years while they were basically living in a squat in
Estonia as a homebrew D&D campaign.

You can kinda see how there my be some 'creative' differences between
members of that core team/founders of the company and their investors
especially when you see their web-site now advertising for a position of
how to make money out of games as a service.

I also have a bit of sweet spot for the company as when they were
developing the game that set-up shop (well a house actually) where I
live which is one of the reasons that the music in the game comes from a
local band.

[JAB]

Well it's now hotting up as some details of the court case are
available. The juicy bit, as alleged, is that one of the original
shareholders wanted to sell his stake and one of the other ones bought
it from them. That all sounds fine but the problem comes in that it was
financed by selling some sketches to a shell company, owned by one of
the investors, for 1 Euro which ZA/UM then bought back for 4.8mil Euros.
A bit of a price hike. Effectively one of the investors used ZA/UM's own
money to acquire the shares.

[JAB]

Oh and a link to the latest part of the saga.

https://www.pcgamer.com/the-legal-war-over-disco-elysium-reaches-disco-elysium-levels-of-complexity/