Those two other Disco Elysium “spiritual successors” you read about today were but filthy pretenders, or at best, the thesis and antithesis resulting in this afternoon’s triumphant synthesis.* The real Disco Elysium spiritual successor is whatever they’re making at Summer Eternal, a just-announced “art collective/RPG studio” founded by a group of, once more with feeling, former Disco Elysium developers.
The press release for this particular Disco Elysiulike has the most actual names on it of the three we’ve learned about this week. It is also, by some distance, the most outwardly socialist of the lot. It accompanies a website, featuring some blood-red all-caps political manifestos and a fairly exhaustive breakdown of Summer Eternal’s workers cooperative structure. Amongst other things, the studio will let people who buy their games form a non-profit within Summer Eternal that gets a share of the revenue, and has a say on company direction.
The former Disco Elysium devs in question are writers Argo Tuulik and Olga Moskvina. They’re joined by several other ZA/UM alumni: former principal writer Dora Klindžić, former senior concept artist Anastasia Ivanova, and former graphic designer Michael Oswell. Confirmed as not involved are former Disco Elysium lead writer Robert Kurvitz and art director Aleksander Rostov, who aren’t involved with at least one of the other “spiritual successor” studios either.
Summer Eternal don’t have a name for their first RPG yet. They’re currently looking “to gather authors, writers, designers who previously worked together on Disco Elysium, as well as new talent, all of us who have yearned to work together on something completely fresh and original, and create a liberating space for us and other veteran RPG developers to finally, after many years, collectively start innovating again in this game space”.
Whatever their eventual RPG project proves to be, Summer Eternal are broadly aiming to do what they feel Disco Elysium did, and smash all precedents to pieces. “I believe that the last time around we made something genre-breaking,” writes Argo Tuulik on the studio’s site (which, let me tell you, was really hard to read and digest at short notice). “Discipline-transcending. Something completely new. I am not ready to give up on that.
“The lessons learned, skills developed, experience forged – for five fucking years I’ve been waiting to put them to use,” he continues. “So we went back to the drawing board with one goal in mind – let’s do it fresh from the start, but this time let’s not fuck each other the moment the checkered flag drops. It makes the entire mankind look bad.”
The part about mistreating creatives is a reference to the bitter recrimination and legal battle between ZA/UM studio management and ousted staff like Kurvitz and writer Helen Hindpere, following Disco Elysium’s release. Many of the people who created the game no longer work at ZA/UM, hence the abundance of alumni projects. Nic has a summary of all that for you here.
Declarations of intent aside, Summer Eternal’s website has a blogpost about their internal structure written by staffer Aleksandar Gavrilović, who is also managing director of Gamechuck. It begins by outlining how Summer Eternal will compromise with capitalism’s many vultures, while pursuing their own vision for a socialist co-op. “The dream is simple to explain: create games, push boundaries, and reinvest the fruits of our artistic labour back into the creation of more art, the thing we are alive for on this earth,” Gavrilović writes. “However, to be able to work on games, these labour intensive works of art, we need capital, in droves.
“On the one hand, private capital (sometimes in the cloak of “patrons of the arts”) has been the preferred shortcut to funding the riskier segment of the arts,” he continues. “On the other hand, capital will always prioritise profit over sustainability and artistic expression, leading to various budgetary and creative conflicts. Thus, the question of organisation becomes a question of the balance of power in this dangerous dance.”
Long story short: Summer Eternal plan to open a shareholding company on 1st April 2025, which will distribute shares between four entities within the studio – each with the power to call assemblies and vote on policy, and each with its own revenue-share model. The full-time creative team for their first game will get 50% of the shares, “managed equally” among co-op members, rather than distributed individually. Workers who aren’t part of the above “creative co-op of full-time workers”, such as outsourcers, will get 25% of shares, distributed according to a structure that permits “capital returns by a system of individual capital accounts”.
A further 20% of shares will go to a limited liability company for investors: once Summer Eternal’s game is released, this LLC will have a revenue-share model, similar to standard publishing contracts. And the final 5% of shares? That’ll go to a non-profit organisation that accepts membership from people who buy Summer Eternal’s games. This in-house “voice of the gamers” will be able to use its share of revenues “to organise events, support union-work, or whatever their assembly (comprised of all members) decides on”, in addition to being able to summon general assemblies with the other three groups to discuss Summer Eternal’s direction.
In case you missed this morning’s write-ups, Summer Eternal’s founders have had their thunder stolen by two other, just-revealed Disco Elys’um ups – Longdue’s untitled “psychogeography RPG” and Dark Math’s XXX Nightshift. The press release makes bracingly salty mention of this. It suggests that one or both of the other, would-be claimants to the Disco throne are just corporate parasites attempting to cash in on the legacy.
“We must be living at the dawn of a cultural Golden Age, when like mushrooms after rain the companies promising ‘the next Disco Elysium’ are popping up every hour on the hour,” it comments. “It’s a sure sign that the 5th anniversary of the release of this monumental game is approaching and every corporation wants a piece of the fortune.
“However, often forgotten in this money lust are the creatives themselves, first instrumentalized for press releases and afterwards underpaid, silenced, bullied, sued, abused…” it goes on. “But it is all of us – the creatives, the workers, the players – who should be holding control over the means of our creation and who should be celebrated on this day.”
I am very happy that the makers of Disco Elysium are back at it, in various guises. The game itself is an incredible RPG – an acerbic and imaginative tale of revolutionary hope and despair, a game with real pain and striving in it. ZA/UM’s implosion since has been horrible to witness. That said, I’m not sure reality can sustain this many attempts to rebottle the lightning. I am officially calling a moratorium on Disco Elysium spiritual successors until next week, at least.
* yes, scholars of dialectical materialism, I know that Marx didn’t really go for the “thesis, antithesis, synthesis” thing