Disco Elysium creative lead Robert Kurvitz was quietly fired from ZA/UM in late 2021, files lawsuit against them

[Ismaul]

 

[rusty_shackleford]

only butthurt I'm detecting here is from the people who demand an interactive book be called a good(it's shit) RPG(it's not)

 

[rusty_shackleford]

 

[vota DC]

I find it funny that with Kurwitz you defend immorality on the part of the company because "that was the contract", but demand the employee take a moral stand at a potentially great personal cost without considering the contractual consequences.

Where did I defend the company? I'm defending people reading the contract before they sign it rather than whining afterwards.

It Is not easy to outsmart the Devil, he Is very effective about using contract against people.

 

[Roguey]

It also doesn't change the fact that ZA/UM owners have been assholes, as owning the IP and profiting from it in exchange for investment to create the game is one thing, but firing the creator after he made you said profit and developing his creation with other people is another.

They fired him because he was the bigger asshole first.

 

[Decado]

Commies and SJW woke tards are fruit from the same ridiculous tree. The former gave birth to the latter. Fitting they should be ousted by the only creatures worse than them.

Whatever. All I cared about was the fact that the people that made the game what it is were ousted, and replaced by retards that I know are incapable of not fucking things up.

(though I still don't see where in the game it is a "communist" game apart from a few NPC's, some backstory, and one plotline that is equally represented by other political plotlines)

It's not that the game is communist. It's that the people who made it are communists. In that same vein, I'd play a game about a serial killer, I will not play a game made by a serial killer.

 

[RickOmbo]

The fans are going to bitch until they see how diverse the cast of the next ZA/UM game is.

 

[ArchAngel]

Commie-larper or no, and asshole or no, being robbed of your life's work is gross injustice.

Especially when the robbers are brainlet "kanata"s with pronouns who are going to shit all over what they stole from you destroying its value while preventing you to do something good with it.

Edit: I wrote the above in response to Infinitron's:

Kurvitz was like Avellone on steroids, a micromanaging meltdown-prone artistic genius who caused a lot of drama, including during Disco Elysium's development. ZA/UM's owners should have put up with it and looked the other way because he's just that good, but my understanding is that this was the reason he was booted.

Game devs won't think twice about robbing investors of their money so you shouldn't be sympathetic of them. Ultimately ZA/UM needs to make money to survive and if Kurvitz is in the way of making a Disco Elysium 2 then he needs to be removed. The unfortunate reality is that Art has always been a business and not a charity, and you need pros to be running a business rather than drama queens.

Kender, is that you? Stop stealing people's chairs!

 

[Harthwain]

Kender, is that you? Stop stealing people's chairs!

Yeah. We don't need "Games are just good business" people making games. In order for games to be good they need character, a soul. Otherwise you end up with some uninspiring crap.

 

[Sordid MCA/Prosper Hybryd]

Commie-larper or no, and asshole or no, being robbed of your life's work is gross injustice.

Especially when the robbers are brainlet "kanata"s with pronouns who are going to shit all over what they stole from you destroying its value while preventing you to do something good with it.

Edit: I wrote the above in response to Infinitron's:

Kurvitz was like Avellone on steroids, a micromanaging meltdown-prone artistic genius who caused a lot of drama, including during Disco Elysium's development. ZA/UM's owners should have put up with it and looked the other way because he's just that good, but my understanding is that this was the reason he was booted.

Game devs won't think twice about robbing investors of their money so you shouldn't be sympathetic of them. Ultimately ZA/UM needs to make money to survive and if Kurvitz is in the way of making a Disco Elysium 2 then he needs to be removed. The unfortunate reality is that Art has always been a business and not a charity, and you need pros to be running a business rather than drama queens.

Kender, is that you? Stop stealing people's chairs!

Kras Mazov is Kender

 

[Twiglard]

Implying that being depressed as an artist is a negative and not a plus.

Artists put out good work in spite of depression, not because of it.

Mood disorders are positively correlated with creativity.

 

[Morgoth]

Implying that being depressed as an artist is a negative and not a plus.

Artists put out good work in spite of depression, not because of it.

Mood disorders are positively correlated with creativity.

Mood disorders are positively correlated with seeing through a lot of bullshit, except your own.

 

[Lyric Suite]

The image of the tortured artist is mostly a 19th century fiction, not in the sense artists can't be like that, but that they don't invariably have to be. Bach was one of the greatest creative geniuses of European history, and the guy had the most common place and uneventful life possible.

I think the fundamental problem is that creative people are instinctively drawn towards the trascendent and find "normality" and everyday life to be a kind of a prison, and generally speaking "normality" (or normieness as it is defined today) IS essentially what defines the bourgeoisie. In a traditional society, such as that of the middle ages, where the trascendent was dominant and the "wordly" and "mundaine" prison of "everyday" bourgeoisie life was not the main and exclusive existential paradigm people encountered in their lives, the idea of the "tortured" artist was none-existent. People had a path towards the trascendent that was Logos laden and did not invite the chaotic or the revolutionary.

But after the Enlightment, which was the age of the bourgeoisie par excellence, Voltaire being one of the most exemplary rapresentative of bourgeoisie values, is when we first started to see rise to the dissatisfied and unruly artist. It wasn't long after the galante was developed (the musical equivalent of the rococo in art) that the strum and drung appeared, almost right away in fact, the strum and drung being merely a foreshadowing of the romantic, and European art has been on a "revolutionary" and chiefly anti-bourgeoisie path ever since.

Schuon, who was generally very critical of Nietzsche, once commented that the best quality of the writings of the latter, far more important than all the dubious philosophical ideas contained in them, was this tragic sense of grandeur, by which Nietzsche sought to fight against the bourgeoisie conception of "civilization" and "culture" that had become dominant over most of Europe by that point, and which has only continued to get worse, which is particularly evident in the modern corporate world, which is really bourgeoisie to a degree unheard of before. In fact, one of the irony is that all the revolutionary political and artistic developments the west as gone through from the middle of the 19th century all the way to the 60s, 70s and so on, is that even the most extreme anti-bourgeoisie movement... is now profoundly bourgeoisie. Modern art, whose entire raison d'etre was to be a big fuck you to bourgeoisie values and aesthetic sensibilities is now fully embraced by the modern bourgeoisie.

The same applies to radical woke politics, which is one of the reasons why the cutting edge in the modern counter-culture is all right-wing in nature. I think commies who are genuinely anti-bourgeoisie are something of a wierd anachronism. Even troonism is basically nothing but big business now. The ZA/UM people thought they were fighting the man with their little commie game and didn't realize that the commies ARE now the man, and the man just wants more money, sorry. The next Disco Elysium will now just be another mediocre woke corporate product.

 

[Lyric Suite]

BTW, this post shows an example of what i'm talking about, in the sense the Zaum guy here correctly identifies the "normie" and bourgeois nature of the modern "woke" culture and how everything they do involves "checking" boxes to achieve some desired measure of diversity quota:

I can see how the original Zaum crew became problematic with the new hires:

Regarding medieval fantasy settings:
https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads...e-thread-go-to-new-thread.109209/post-4633847

All you can do in a static, societally unstructured world is give out-of-place shoutouts to present day communities for cheap popularity (“this is exactly my sexual orientation, how did they know?!”).

 

[sser]

Kurvitz will be alright. I sent him my finest collection of Jordan B. Peterson clips.

 

[S.torch]

Likewise with ZAUM I'm sure the money men would have been happy to have a monopoly on the new big name game writer if not for all the baggage that came with it.

Oh hell, poor corporate rich guys... victims of that evil drunk writer! He had them on the tip of the cliff! Luckily, they invited these urbanites from big cities addicted to social media, those are real models to follow and trust. Just like they have showed time and time again!

I have no words for such aggravated people.

 

[0sacred]

Implying that being depressed as an artist is a negative and not a plus.

Artists put out good work in spite of depression, not because of it.

Mood disorders are positively correlated with creativity.

hoo boy, if mental illness was a great boost to creativity those dangerhairs in the industry would be putting out some amazing work

 

[S.torch]

Ho ho ho... I don't know if this was posted yet, but according to a post on Tumblr, Robert is planning to take the company to the courts. And apparently there's a chance they're planning to take the IP back.

I don't speak Estonian, so is a bit hard to check myself. Maybe another codexer want to take a look. And maybe this cheers the staff to post this in the new's portal.

 

[Ismaul]

The relevant info:

Robert is planning to take za/um to court in this coming November. (Here)

“[Kurvitz]’s statement against ZA/UM studio for information and document inspection”

The likely takeaway is that Robert Kurvitz intends to have documents inspected to prove that they were fraudulent, possibly documents that had him signing the IP over, which would line up with everything that Luiga has insinuated thus far. (Luiga confirming that the IP was stolen) This means that Luiga’s tweet about how we “might even get the sequel the way it was meant” but that it may “take a shit ton of time” and his followup interview statement about how he doesn’t think “ZA/UM Studio in its current form [will be] developing the sequel” are not contradictory, as they may seem at first, but expressing hope that the sequel may be returned to Kurvitz. On top of having to develop the game, they also have to fight for the rights to the property, hence it may take a “shit ton of time” to get a sequel.

But it actually seems likely that Kurvitz may regain ownership of the IP. As someone far smarter than myself suggested: “Robert [is] suing the Estonian parent company, in which he is a minority shareholder, for some kind of documents and information. This would hint that there is SOME kind of breach of contract there, that he’s entitled to some access, but they’re trying to cut him off and he’s taking them to court to force them to give access. This would usually be the first step before launching a larger legal attack. Collect info, plan your big case, then go in with guns blazing, so to say. I’m wagering bad faith contract, being tricked into signing off the IP. That would be the big game.”

What we have learned through financial digging is that Rostov and Kurvitz still own shares in the company, (ZA/UM UK company info) meaning that this is still most likely their source of income.

 

[AwesomeButton]

The relevant info:

Robert is planning to take za/um to court in this coming November. (Here)

“[Kurvitz]’s statement against ZA/UM studio for information and document inspection”

The likely takeaway is that Robert Kurvitz intends to have documents inspected to prove that they were fraudulent, possibly documents that had him signing the IP over, which would line up with everything that Luiga has insinuated thus far. (Luiga confirming that the IP was stolen) This means that Luiga’s tweet about how we “might even get the sequel the way it was meant” but that it may “take a shit ton of time” and his followup interview statement about how he doesn’t think “ZA/UM Studio in its current form [will be] developing the sequel” are not contradictory, as they may seem at first, but expressing hope that the sequel may be returned to Kurvitz. On top of having to develop the game, they also have to fight for the rights to the property, hence it may take a “shit ton of time” to get a sequel.

But it actually seems likely that Kurvitz may regain ownership of the IP. As someone far smarter than myself suggested: “Robert [is] suing the Estonian parent company, in which he is a minority shareholder, for some kind of documents and information. This would hint that there is SOME kind of breach of contract there, that he’s entitled to some access, but they’re trying to cut him off and he’s taking them to court to force them to give access. This would usually be the first step before launching a larger legal attack. Collect info, plan your big case, then go in with guns blazing, so to say. I’m wagering bad faith contract, being tricked into signing off the IP. That would be the big game.”

What we have learned through financial digging is that Rostov and Kurvitz still own shares in the company, (ZA/UM UK company info) meaning that this is still most likely their source of income.

As I said, "robbed of his life's work". Let's see though.

 

[notpl]

"And this is a good thing"

There you go Rusty, saved you the bother of posting again.

You seem angry that I dislike mediocre visual novels.

Could you recommend some better ones?

 

[rusty_shackleford]

"And this is a good thing"

There you go Rusty, saved you the bother of posting again.

You seem angry that I dislike mediocre visual novels.

Could you recommend some better ones?

Heard good things about age of decadence.

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

This fucking sucks, but was probably inevitable.

Financial stuff aside, those three are all artists who achieved a stunning degree of critical and commercial success. That kinda thing goes to your head, makes you hard to work with. At least two of them were recovering addicts—if that were me, I’d be throwing coke-fueled orgies in the office at least once a week.

ZAUM should’ve sucked it up and coddled them like the niche industry rockstars they’d become (for PR/marketing purposes if nothing else). Maybe they tried that, though, and just didn’t have the patience.

As for the future, Kender is a backstabbing son of a bitch, but he’s got good taste in RPGs (like a much smarter Feargus). Could be worth pirating their next one, even if the best we can hope for is a Fallout 2 situation.

 

[AwesomeButton]

At least two of them were recovering addicts

BTW, this is gettng thrown around a lot. Are there any citations, I haven't followed every interview.

 

[The Wall]

Leftists, woke and socialist eat their own for dinner. It was dinner time. Jew needs to control always: both thesis and antithesis. Then he can make synthesis anything Jew wants

They can move back to Eastern Europe, go to Kickstarter, based on their names, fame and sad story alone easily get 1m $ funding, which is worth in Balkans 10× more, make their own new company, make Disco 2 by other name, reach Steam Early Access, make million$. Same option was and still is possible to Tim Cain, Lenard Boyarsky, Josh Sawyer, Chris Avellone. All of them prefer to be bootlickers to libshit woke world order in West

But all of that would demand work. And socialists, and 40+ middle class Western Devs are allergic to work. It's far easier to go insane, get drunk and enjoy misery of being victim. Or get fucked by Big Daddy Microsoft for monthly paycheck