Earlier this year, People Make Games published a huge investigative documentary about Disco Elysium and the allegation that the intellectual property rights to the game and its successor were stolen from its original creators. Last week they were nominated for Best Creator of the Year by The Game Awards. That’s the same show that awarded Disco Elysium in 2019.

Their nomination reminded me of the mixed experience I had watching the documentary and I want to take this opportunity to argue that, even though their video on Disco Elysium is among the highest quality, highly ambitious pieces of investigative videogame journalism out there, it also falls short at places that matter a lot, and I think it doesn’t do the game, its creators, or their channel justice.

The video by People Make Games investigates the ownership conflicts around Disco Elysium. They interview the accused CEO and ZA/UM majority shareholder (that’s the studio that made Disco Elysium), current ZA/UM employees, and three founding creators of the game, including the creative lead, Robert Kurvitz.

Helen, Rostov and Robert were fired from the studio when Ilmar Kompus, through means of highly questionable legality and with the help of the known financial fraudster Tõnis Haavel, acquired a majority share in ZA/UM and, probably behind Kurvitz’ back, also created a new company that holds the intellectual property rights for the Disco Elysium successor.

Now, Kurvitz is in the process of losing the rights to his life’s work, while we are losing the prospect of ever playing a worthy Disco Elysium Successor. The more accurate version of this is obviously their video itself, which you should definitely check out. It does a great job at mapping the situation and for most of its parts, I have nothing but praise for it.

So, what went wrong? Let’s frontload the more obvious observations: The video was way harder on Kurvitz for wanting to create a Disco Elysium successor outside of the grasp of financial criminals, than it was on those financial fraudsters themselves. Not a fraction of the genuine anger that Chris showed towards Kurvitz for wanting to leave a horrible environment was directed at those who created that environment in the first place.

The video concludes with Kurvitz being displayed as a bully, as being “outrageous” and “massively disrespectful”, while the person who certainly is among the single most destructive people in the whole gaming industry gets away as unscathed as his allies, without any kind of moral verdict. In the first interview with Kompus, the CEO and majority shareholder, Chris patiently lets him tell his own story of how a franchise worth millions and the lifework of passionate artists just kinda ended up in his hands, and how he, in his newly acquired position of power, had to fire Robert, Rostov and Helen for workplace toxicity and their lack of contribution.

I will go into these apparent reasons later, but this was at a time when Chris was already told how, shortly before the firing, Kompus and his criminal friends misused company funds (that were supposed to finance the sequel) to increase their own shares in the studio. It was also at a time when he already knew that improper workplace conduct was used as a reason for firing Kurvitz right after he started asking questions about shady proceedings in the company and demanded insight into essential financial documents.

How is it then that Chris, without any sense of irony, repeats Kompus’ claims to Kurvitz and then gets genuinely angry at him for denying these allegations of toxicity? Why does he find that “outrageous”, but not actual crimes, or Kompus dismissing them? Especially since a lot of the concrete allegations against Kurvitz are either not confirmed by the rest of the staff or, in the case of alleged sexist behaviour, outright dismissed by its supposed victim.

“Stop using my name and gender to advance your agenda. It has nothing to do with standing up for women – it uses gender in a deeply cynical matter for personal gain.”

Now, Kurvitz did leave some damage behind when he distanced himself from the studio after publishing the base game in 2019. Many of the current ZA/UM employees that were interviewed had their qualms with Kurvitz for leaving them pretty much alone with the Final Cut, for being unclear to them about the studio’s future, and ultimately for being willing to leave them behind while he tried to realize his dream for the Disco Elysium successor.

“What he tends to do with the next project is to work on it for the next seven years and for that he is going to need three people, two writers and Rostov as the artist.”

Leaving behind people who trusted Kurvitz’ leadership and who put their heart and overtime too into Disco Elysium just as much as he did, is unfair and reckless. The ZA/UM employees have all right to be disappointed and angry. Kurvitz did apologize for that in some extent in the video and acknowledges his privilege of being able take time off when others couldn’t. And like Chris, I too would have liked Kurvitz to apologize in a less abstract way; however, I also understand that the documentary will be used in court to document every single one of his personal shortcomings ever to use them against him.

So I think it is essential to ask: What exactly did Kurvitz distance himself from? Why did he desire a break from the previous corporate structures to create a new environment for the Disco Elysium sequel, even before he knew about all that shady stuff going on?

One reason was to regain creative freedom. Kurvitz and Rostov were demoted from their respective creative lead positions in writing and art. These roles have been gradually wrestled away from them, and Kurvitz did not want his project and the world he created to be at the complete mercy of the new directors.

One other reason were the working conditions. Kurvitz, together with his friends and colleagues, all suffered under the relentless crunch that was ordered by investors and the executive level. Working extreme overtime for years without breaks have left them with permanent damage to their mental health, leaving them burnt out, in mental institutions, disabled, in rehab, or at least in therapy.

Additionally, Helen, and I’m sure it was the case for many others too, was also deprived of other basic worker’s rights through illegal employment tactics. So I was left to wonder – why is none of that considered “bully behaviour”, “toxicity” or “not always pleasant”, but Kurvitz fleeing from that environment is? The video has a tendency of just naturalizing power exerted by the side of capital, be it inhumane workplace conditions or shady financial practices that rob artists of their past and future work.

For example, is it really so hard for Chris to say a simple thing like “financial criminals are not good people”, like he quotes here from Kurvitz’ letter? In a letter that he thinks is “outrageous” and “massively disrespectful” because it distracts from what he perceives as the problem at hand. But I wonder what really distracts from the problem at the core of all of this, from the crimes that poisoned the whole studio and brought all that misery to both Kurvitz and all other workers at ZA/UM in the first place.

In the letter that Chris quoted and that you can read fully in the PMG video, Kurvitz wrote about “Exiting the Vampire Castle”. And while it works perfectly fine as an intuitive metaphor for a group of creatives wanting to leave the grasp of finance capital, it is also the title of an essay by Mark Fisher who coined that phrase. I recommend you read it in full, even though some parts have aged badly.

I will however quote one paragraph: “The first law of the Vampires’ Castle is: individualise and privatise everything. While in theory it claims to be in favour of structural critique, in practice it never focuses on anything except individual behaviour. Some of these working-class types are not terribly well brought up, and can be very rude at times. Remember: condemning individuals is always more important than paying attention to impersonal structures. The actual ruling class propagates ideologies of individualism, while tending to act as a class.”

And isn’t it a prime example of this class solidarity that you see surrounding the studio’s financial affairs. It’s an enormous feat by the team of PMG to have broken it down so clearly. Which is why I cannot comprehend why they chose for the rest two thirds of the video to focus exclusively on Kurvitz’ personal shortcomings. It’s disproportional. I get that Chris can’t exactly force a statement about the shareholder situation from the current employees because their livelihoods are on the line and they just saw three of their former colleagues getting fired after poking their noses into their bosses’ affairs.

But it is still not only disproportionate, but also two separate things. You just cannot weigh Kurvitz being a jerk and taking time off against the major financial fraud that would have happened completely independent of Kurvitz’ personality disposition anyways. And yet the video ends with “well, neither side is innocent”, “it’s complicated”, and most importantly a suddenly very emotional “Kurvitz is a horrible person”, which concludes the video and retroactively shapes its whole vibe.