https://www.gamesindustry.biz/disco-elysium-studio-zaum-confirms-former-employees-were-fired-for-misconduct
Blatant hit piece, even if the specific timing is ridiculously coincidental, the statements provided are obvious character assassination, in the middle of talking about misconduct the money fucks suddenly turn and call them delusional for wanting control of the "companys intellectual property" as well as smearing them for considering profit secondary.
Also they quote Martin in support of the money mens statement, yet Martin independently in one of his own statements said that he felt certain that any toxic work environment was on the part of upper management then blamed on Kurvitz.
:surprised-pika:
shocked that kurvitz would try to 'take control' of his own creation
Yeah, I'm sure he was a bit shitty given his history but also at least 2 of the "big 4" seem like more or less nice people to collaborate with.
Toxic here seems to be "we don't want what corporate wants and we will be mad about it."
We also have to remember after that unfortunate incident with the Government newspaper Estonian media hates them with an unending passion.
oh i 100% believe there was a toxic work environment after seeing some of the employees on twitter. but i think we know which side it was really coming from
for example https://twitter.com/TravelSizeTrish/status/1576648773648154624 (just realised this isn't even a za/um employee they're a former blizzard employee. but there was an actual za/um employee saying the same stuff. wish i could remember their name)
publicly and problematically been pro-Russia and Stalin state
:based-department:
also what the fuck does "Stalin state" mean, like Stalin's state or something? Is this some new level of smearing where we claim the Soviet Union was personally owned by :bugs-stalin:
you should see the stalin net worth calculations. they try to claim the gdp of the soviet union was his net worth lol
but you see Stalin had a kind-of nice car he got driven around on for official occasions, that means he totally was a gajillionaire who owned every acre of land and bushel of wheat in the entire USSR!
Yeah, US president in Air Force One is just smol bean but Castro is evil because he had a nice desk.
If the car was a total piece of shit they would've said it was evidence of the USSR's poverty. Can't win
This is incredibly terminally online but here's my personal theory for what happened in the workplace environment.
I think that a lot of ZA/UM's hiring done in the UK , and especially London, has brought a lot more middle class-first world, social democrat and "anarchist" (not real anarchists, the anarcho-NATOist weirdos) type into the company. And they've clashed with the Kurvitz's self described "We were anarchists, after all - growing into hardboiled Marxist-Leninists on empty stomachs" (I only mentioned Kurvitz because he wrote the outro. I don't know how the other two would call themselves)
i remember seeing a post about how there were basically no original ZA/UM devs anymore, the studio was chock full of english academy brits
The "toxic culture" is entirely a result of those 4 dunking on their lib colleagues
confirms
I didn't know that's a thing you can do. So I guess you can "confirm" something you just said and have it reported as truth
Don't these kinds of articles usually end with "we contacted X and Y for comment but they didn't answer?" Rather than just parroting literally what some other sources said and then calling a day? Let me guess, that would have been problematic as kurvitz and co would very much have responded. Having the editor of the book also come out and say "yeah it was a shitshow" is a bit damning, imo, what angle could he have? Fallout and subsequent corpo payoff? We'll probably never know for sure.
Assume, for the sake of argument all of this is true. Companies usually keep sexpest creatives around and shield them for waaaaay too long as long as they're bringing in the big bucks. So, if anything, this particular company "doing the right thing" and kicking them out (right after the project is finished, we can't do the right thing before getting that bread) is out of ordinary and makes me thing this is indeed intended as character assassination.
just parroting literally what some other sources said and then calling a day
this is a much larger proportion of articles than most people realize. I would say that only about 15% of journalists actually do journalism.
What do you want from an online magazine that uses the ".biz" suffix? I'm amazed this whole thing wasn't written by an AI.
Was Helen Hindpere also doing 'gender discrimination'? Or management thinks that they could say any shit?
Can we get an emote of JK Simmons as J. Jonah Jameson doing the "in print it's libel" line?
