Jason Schreier

One is that there actually are a few people, I'm trying to get the exact number, but there are some people who worked on Disco Elysium who are working on this new game and just stuck around at CDO Zalm.

So it's not totally new people, even though a lot of the core creative team and the people who like

created the ip essentially created the story robert kurwitz who is the right of the main writer um he is no longer there um i think one of the reasons they chose to do a new ip is is for that reason and it's more of it's a very different kind of game i mean it's it's the same genre and style but this is a spy game rather than a game about a kind of an inept cop and his partner um

A few other things he told me that I thought were really interesting, just a couple of fun little anecdotes.

One is that Studio Zaum has unionized, and he was telling me that after reviewing their requests and having a bunch of conversations with them, he and management decided to voluntarily recognize the union, which is something that it's essentially what management does when they're like, you know what, we're cool with people, we don't want to

drag this out and turn it into a fight.

So instead we want to work together to create a better environment for everybody.

I thought that was an interesting, an interesting bit of context here.

He told me that they work 35 hour work weeks.

And for this game, they had one month of crunch where they added 10 hours to that.

So they worked.

So their version of quote unquote crunch was 45 hours work week.

And it was all like paid over time.

Wow.

Uh, he told me, and this is the anecdote that you guys are going to crack up at.

He told me that, um, he told me that during development, they went on what he called a good old fashioned clanker hunt where he got a posse.

This is Ed's words of three other people.

And they went out and put together a questionnaire and surveyed every single person on the dev team and made them sign, uh, sign this attestation saying, I did not use generative AI in this game under punishment of losing my job.

Kind of a good old fashioned clanker hunt is what Ed says.

I was like, does that mean like they couldn't use Google?