Summer Eternal is one of three new studios that recently arose from the ashes of Disco Elysium developer ZA/UM’s spectacular implosion, a dispiritingly-capitalist coda to a success story born of a frequently-anticapitalist game. To hear Summer Eternal’s co-founders tell it, they’ve learned their lesson. “We realized we weren’t going to get anywhere by trying to bargain with the rich,” former Disco Elysium writer Dora Klindžić said to Aftermath. “We’d have to turn the tables, create a place where the workers make the rules.”
Co-founded by Disco Elysium writers Argo Tuulik and Olga Moskvina, alongside several others, Summer Eternal pushes its worker-centric ethos further than most; while it has yet to provide details about its early-in-development role-playing game, it has published a manifesto centered around empowering creatives and a detailed breakdown of its cooperative studio structure, which keeps creatives at the wheel with 50 percent of company shares (and an additional 25 percent reserved for collaborators). Investors get just 20 percent, and – in a unique twist – players get 5 percent. The former Disco Elysium devs brought on Aleksandar Gavrilović, formerly of unionized Croatian studio Gamechuck, specifically to organize their company.
It’s an ambitious structure, and Tuulik, Klindžić, and co are fully aware that it could fail. But they’re also optimistic. In an industry that acts as though its best and brightest minds are disposable, there’s nowhere to go but up.
“Now it feels like we can finally leave old mistakes behind,” said Klindžić, “and only make new mistakes.”
All this in mind, Summer Eternal felt like the perfect studio to spotlight in the debut of our new article series, Fire Your Boss, in which we, a worker-owned video game website, talk to worker-owned video game companies about how they came to be, how they make it all work, and how everyone involved can (hopefully) pave the way to a better future for the industry.
Here’s the full interview:
Aftermath: Why did you decide to go with a worker-owned model? Was that part of your operation ever in doubt, or was it a foregone conclusion out the gate?
Aleksandar Gavrilović, organizer: It was really 50-50 between a completely evil and cynical corporate structure and an open commune-style complex co-op, but in the end we flipped a coin and it turned out tails (just our luck!). Kidding, but of course it was a foregone conclusion, the entire team has roots in punk and/or other left-leaning subcultures, and when you combine it with the traumatic and highly publicized experience of the past few years, what else was there to do!
It might be glorious, or it might be disastrous, but it deserves to be documented for any future similar endeavors.
Dora Klindžić, writer: I think Aleks covers it well. We had been trying out different things, seeing whether compromises with capital are possible, but life just kept teaching us the same lesson over and over: that it is a Faustian bargain. As the Ursula Le Guin quote goes, an individual cannot bargain with the state, for the state recognizes no coinage but power, and it issues the coins itself. So we realized we weren’t going to get anywhere by trying to bargain with the rich. We’d have to turn the tables, create a place where the workers make the rules.
Aftermath: You announced your existence to the world with a manifesto, which is unusual for video game companies. Why did you ultimately decide to go with that approach? Why did it feel like the right way to do things for this studio in particular?
Klindžić: We just felt fed up! We felt, as writers, as though our tongues had been tied for so long, and we had to start doing what we do best – using our talent for words to bring about agitation, excitement, a detonation of feeling. At the same time, kicking off the project with a focus on writing would help us deliver a proof-of-concept that we’ve got the literary skill necessary to back up our ambitions. It was another Le Guin quote which inspired me in this direction: “Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.”
Gavrilović: Another way to do it would be to work quietly on a game concept and announce it with a bang. But we really want to do something different with Summer Eternal, something revolutionary even with the structure. Because the structure will surely dictate the game. And since it’s so experimental, we felt it was important to keep the audience involved. First through developer diaries, and later perhaps even through documentary footage. It might be glorious, or it might be disastrous, but it deserves to be documented for any future similar endeavors.
Aftermath: You decided to make your manifesto into a downloadable pamphlet, which is cool! What was the thinking there? How do you envision people using it?
Gavrilović: That was entirely Twitter’s (X’s) fault! People are all so excited about the manifesto and constantly asking for something they can disseminate – whether online or offline. The community has already created so much fanart regarding our announcement, but my favorite fan work is the magazine-style multi-page printed manifesto by @RestoreMiAmor.
Klindžić: Indeed, we’d seen fans localizing the manifesto in various languages, looking for more ways to share it, and this was absolutely incredible to see. After so many years of ruin where our words disappeared into the void, it was a good reminder of their worth and their power.
Aftermath: Your shareholder model – which ensures, ideally, that creatives will always retain control – has a lot of potential. How did you come up with it? As someone who is also part of a worker-owned company, I have to ask: How many meetings did it take? Hundreds? Thousands?
Klindžić: You’d think so! Here I have to praise Aleks, as he was extremely efficient at researching and coming up with solutions. We approached him with a number of nightmares we had seen during our recent years (hostile takeovers, corporate influence on creative decisions, people being fired from their life’s work, predatory investors) and asked him whether these risks could be structurally designed out of existence.
I expected the answer would be that it’s impossible, but we were thoroughly impressed with Aleks’ multifaceted proposal for the studio architecture. Aleks had already been practicing running a co-operative game studio in Zagreb for many, many years, so he already had knowledge of the praxis, pitfalls, and ideas for new experiments. We’re so extremely fortunate to be able to work with someone of such a unique skillset in the industry. Now it feels like we can finally leave old mistakes behind, and only make new mistakes.
It’s quite a dangerous thing, investing in game developers, doubly so if it’s investing in worker-friendly game developers. Triply so if it’s profit-hating and capital-bashing game developers.
Gavrilović: People tend to equate workplace democracy with endless meetings, however true democracy is much more “militaristic” than the loud bourgeois avoidance of responsibility we see as democracy – tasks are given and responsibilities are palpable. After explaining their wishes, the core creatives have put their trust in me to draft an idea. There was a meeting regarding the exact share divisions, and some things are deliberately vague as I just didn’t have time or the resources to detail such an ambitious idea (how to define the weighted votes for various freelancers, of which some might just do one thing in a week, and some might be on-and-off for years, etc).
There was a more broad assembly meeting where the only thing that raised eyebrows was the motto “every player – member of the board.” Of course, I tend to believe rules are paramount for a functioning democracy, and this is what my main priority will be in the following weeks and months: setting up rules of conduct so that the system works.
Aftermath: You worked with the Institute For Economic Democracy from Slovenia to implement your co-ops. What did they end up contributing? How did they help you structure your company?
Gavrilović: We’ve been in contact with several of their people, and they have outlined several important misconceptions in our early drafts. For example, the difference between non-individualized and indirectly-individualized co-operatives, and the differences in handling of capital income. However, it’s not really manifesto material, so I will spare us the details. The main bulk of work that will come from IED later – once we’re ready to establish. Another organization to mention here is the Fairshares model, whose members also helped flesh out certain aspects of our player-ownership structure. They are all happy to contribute, but there is a learning curve since games are not your usual “consumer products,” both in terms of the production cycle and general business models.
Aftermath: Investors will also have a seat at the table, though a smaller one than creators. How do you envision that playing out? Are you hoping to minimize the influence of investors on the game itself?
Gavrilović: It’s quite a dangerous thing, investing in game developers, doubly so if it’s investing in worker-friendly game developers. Triply so if it’s profit-hating and capital-bashing game developers. So the only way to attract investors is to ensure that they will actually get something out of it, which is why we tried to emulate a “revenue share” model common in publisher-developer agreements for the investment corporation that will hold the part of the pie. They will most likely have a lot of influence informally, as investors usually do, but formally we tried to limit their reach, cordoning them off into a special entity where they can dilute and drag along or tag along (actual investment lingo!) each other as much as they want, while the creatives can focus on the game.
Klindžić: The happy investor play-pen!
Aftermath: You’re allotting five percent of shares to players, which makes a degree of sense (to me) in this era of regularly-updated games. That said, you’re making a role-playing game, not something I typically associate with that model of development. Why include players in this way? And sorry to sound like a broken record, but since you’re still early in all of this, how do you see that part playing out? What are your expectations?
Gavrilović: It’s probably going to be just the fans at first, or perhaps backers if we do crowdfunding (a viable plan), as you’re very right, it will be years before the game is out. They should be involved in the game development in a limited (hence, 5%) capacity which is important for full transparency. With ambitious projects lasting years, things can get demoralizing for eager players waiting for a game that seemingly keeps extending deadlines, and we’ve seen this a lot in the game space, so we wanted players to have a formal seat at a table as well, and see that we’re not some vaporware company faking development; but any delays (that will certainly happen because this is game development, not soap production) actually need to be transparently explained and addressed to the shareholders, now finally including the players themselves.
Klindžić: I think what I like behind this little 5% slice is that it reminds us of values we should keep to even if we get successful: generosity, humbleness. We have seen very closely how willing corporate shareholders are to ruin each others’ lives over 5%, the iron grip on every inch of what is theirs, violence to keep it. They don’t share even with each other, let alone with those who created their wealth. The fact that we want to go a step further than even your standard workers’ co-op and say “None of us will have this piece of the pie, this is for whoever wants to come here and role-play politics with us,” it feels like a release from the worst human impulse, that possessive impulse of greed and paranoia, which tells you no one can be trusted, that you must keep all for yourself.
A social experiment where instead of giving away our shares to some thirsty venture capitalist, we let random people steer a company 'Twitch Plays Pokémon'-style? That’s legendary.
That fear makes you small like the little money-guy who lives inside you, inside all of us. Our move is instead to string up our inner money-guy upside down and give another sacrilegious fuck-you to the suits who spend your whole life telling you the main objective in life is to maximize private property. I think some people are upset because we’re perverting that which is falsely sacred: the Share.
This experiment will be insulated in a non-profit organization which will form a self-contained biological ecosystem, a terrarium which will certainly teach us a lot about various life-forms, both primitive and extravagant, cryptid and collective. Also, honestly I just want to do it because it’s fucking funny. A social experiment where instead of giving away our shares to some thirsty venture capitalist, we let random people steer a company “Twitch Plays Pokémon”-style? That’s legendary.
Aftermath: This is a very complex structure, but on a day-by-day basis, how do you see it impacting (or not impacting) game development? Worker-owned/non-hierarchical structures often require a lot of deliberation. Are you concerned at all that that might affect the pace of development?
Gavrilović: My main influence was WW2 partisan-style democracy. There is a time for deliberation, and a time for action, and the two interact in specific, rule-bound ways. This militarism probably stems from my childhood love of Star Trek where you have space communism but also a strict chain of command.
Klindžić: In this regard, I often invoke that Bakunin quote: “In the matter of boots, I defer to the authority of the bootmaker…” Just because there are no capitalist bosses, that does not mean that the creative project will not have some structure of seniority, a division of decision-making power, and a certain degree of project management and accountability. The difference is that such structures should be propped up by the real things that matter in this world, which are skill, knowledge, experience, talent. Not imposed by money and perpetuated by fear of economic uncertainty.
Aftermath: You’re obviously coming from a project that gave the world a remarkable game, but which led to a fractured workplace – one which grew from a small group of friends into something untenable. What are your main, specific takeaways from that? Where did things break down, for you personally, at ZA/UM? And how did you tailor this new structure to avoid those pitfalls?
Argo Tuulik, writer: We’ve got a strict “No Narcissism” policy in place, and stickers asking “Is your workplace actually a cult?” plastered everywhere in the common areas. We really don’t want that to happen. Making sure that the people who do the work are fairly credited is another big one. It is insane to me that to this day Martin Luiga who is such an integral part of Elysium and Elysium worldbuilding is only credited as ‘editor’ on Disco. Fired twice, this man did not get to feast on the fruits of his labor.
Instead of one Disco 2 thrown together by a few burnt out and emotionally scarred artists and a whole lot of unfounded executive bravado, you now get multiple distinct directions from people who’ve had time to live interesting lives in between.
Sustainable growth is another big one. I’m a big fan of the way Supergiant Games approach growing their team, as I’ve heard from talks given by their founder Amir Rao. It’s a slow and deliberate approach. following the idea of trying to always “complete the team” rather than expand the team. This really speaks to me ‘cause I’ve also seen what happens when a company of thirty explodes to over one hundred in less than a year for no apparent rhyme or reason and how the following breakdown in communication also broke a lot of people mentally.
Aftermath: I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask: There are suddenly a lot of studios staffed by former Disco Elysium devs! You’ve said that you’re not trying to make a Disco Elysium successor, but how do you feel about this proliferation of studios from that lineage? Do you think any of them are doing anything interesting structurally? And do you think this is ultimately a better outcome for all involved, or would you have preferred that ZA/UM – at least, as it was before – not succumb to internal strife?
Tuulik: The time since Disco’s fall has been pretty bleak, and up until recently staying positive about the future has felt like an exercise in self-delusion. Not anymore. From death springs life and from old, new. I am genuinely excited to think that instead of one Disco 2 thrown together by a few burnt out and emotionally scarred artists and a whole lot of unfounded executive bravado, you now get multiple distinct directions from people who’ve had time to live interesting lives in between, acquire interesting experiences. I am very happy the spring has returned to the fields of Elysium. We can all live and grow here.
Fire Your Boss is a series of interviews with worker-owned video game companies about how they came to be, how they make it all work, and how everyone involved can (hopefully) pave the way to a better future for the industry. If you'd like to be part of it, feel free to reach out to nathan@aftermath.site.
