Pirating this game is probably the most ethical way to play it
this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2025
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Disco Elysium
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Unless you bought it when it came out, it’s now the only ethical way to play it.
Why look a gift horse in the mouth???
OOTL casual scroller - what happened?
ZA/UM was an artist-owned cooperative studio.
But then an investor fraudulently obtained financial control over the company, forced out the original leaders, and out-lawyered them. Now it's just another corporate game studio, and neither the lead writer, the lead programmer, nor the art director of Disco Elysium works there anymore.
I only know so much, something about switching dev teams/ownership and screwing the original devs but I found an article that claims to know the whole thing.
https://80.lv/articles/truth-behind-firing-disco-elysium-developers-za-um-s-canceled-sequel
to save anyone reading this: basically it's big business boys trying to rat fuck each other with a series of sneaky business moves to acquire shares or maintain operational control... at the expense of creative efforts and next projects. So some (presumably nice, innocent) people got fucked over by corporate greed at the expense of art but likely someone got rich off it.
Basically, giving something away for free that would normally have a cost is a market manipulation tactic. Epic does this as a means to draw customers away from their competition, primarily Valve, thereby reinforcing their position in the capitalist market.
They're not drawing me anywhere. I made the mistake of buying something on there once and was dismayed to find that the updates for the game that had been available on Steam for months just weren't applied to Epic.
Now I just grab all the free stuff which is usually a bit older and thus fully updated anyway.
Does Epic pay the full amount to the game publisher per copy when they give away free games, or does it work some other way?