We learn the news from industry insider Nibel who signal-boosted a Medium post by the ZA/UM cultural association founding member and Secretary, Martin Luiga who revealed the news amongst a broader post.
I, Martin Luiga, a founding member and Secretary of the ZA/UM cultural association, as well as the assembler of most of the core team, am hereby dissolving the ZA/UM cultural association (not to be confused with the ZA/UM company, on which subject I would note that neither Kurvitz, Hindpere nor Rostov are working there since the end of last year and their leaving the company was involuntary. Which would seem like bad news for the loving fans that are waiting for the Disco sequel.)
The reason for dissolving the cultural organization is that it no longer represents the ethos it was founded on. People and ideas are meant to be eternal; organizations may well be temporary. I find that the organization was successful overall and most of the mistakes that were made were contingent, determined by the sociocultural conditions we were thrown into. I still encourage people to organize, and I would say that one of the qualities that the ZA/UM cultural organization sorely lacked was pretty much any formal structure.
For a while, it was beautiful. My sincerest thanks to all that have rooted for us.
In response to a comment on the Medium post, Luiga commented
Imagine a kleptomaniac, if you will. 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. It’s what they always do, really. One of them was the first guy to be convicted for investment fraud in Estonia. All the same, idk if we would have managed to get the initial investment without these people.
Nothing has yet been confirmed by the development studio itself, nor has a sequel to Disco Elysium been confirmed, but Luiga didn’t think that the absences were hurting the development of the game, replying on Twitter to another commenter,
Nah I think that things with the sequel are actually sweet enough, you might even get it the way it was meant, it might take a shit ton of time but RPG fans are sorta accustomed to waiting, ain’t they
Hopefully we’ll hear more about the game in the near future, or at least something from these departed developers to explain their sudden departure from the studio.
