Who's Telling the Truth about Disco Elysium?

The May 2023 long-form investigative documentary by Quintin Smith and Chris Bratt at People Make Games — the YouTube games-journalism channel both founded after leaving Rock Paper Shotgun in 2020 — into the conflict that ended with the ouster of Robert Kurvitz, Aleksander Rostov, and Helen Hindpere from ZA/UM in late 2021 and their formal firing in October 2022. The documentary is the most detailed public account of the dispute, running roughly ninety minutes, with extensive interviews with multiple parties on several sides of the conflict.

Published on YouTube in May 2023, the piece is a primary-research investigation: interviews with Argo Tuulik (writer, longtime Kurvitz associate dating to the early-2000s tabletop-RPG era, critical of Kurvitz's later conduct), with Martin Luiga (ZA/UM cultural-association founding member), with Kaur Kender (producer and at times CEO), and with Kurvitz, Rostov, and Hindpere themselves. The People Make Games team also consulted Estonian legal documents and shareholder records. The core conflict documented: the creative leads claim they were forced out when they discovered a scheme by a trio of investors to take control of the studio; the investors and at least one longtime collaborator (Tuulik) describe a different story involving creative underdelivery and toxic working conditions. The documentary does not adjudicate; it documents what each side claims and lets the viewer weigh.

The piece sits as the canonical journalistic source for the ZA/UM controversy. The Jacobin essay from September 2023 reads the same material through a labour- politics frame; the Routledge academic volume largely brackets the controversy in favour of the game's text. People Make Games's documentary is the place to read for what actually happened (or what each side says happened) inside the studio. The aftermath has continued: Tuulik has publicly said since that he felt Kurvitz's presentation in the documentary was dishonest and manipulative, and Klindžić alleged retaliation against Tuulik by executives after the documentary's release.

The stake is journalistic and partisan-difficult. People Make Games is funded primarily through Patreon and viewer donations, with no studio or publisher entanglements; the investigative- journalism stance the channel takes has cost it access to some parts of the industry and earned it credibility in others. Smith and Bratt are former Rock Paper Shotgun staff; their politics lean broadly left and games-labour-positive but the documentary itself is unusually careful about not picking a side. Watch the documentary, read the Jacobin follow-up, and suspend final judgement until the legal proceedings (ongoing as of 2024–25) produce a more settled account.