https://pastebin.com/R37fXi4p An English translation to the article.
This means that Kompus will not be able to freely sell "Disco Elysium" because Kurvitz could block the deal. At the same time, Kurvitz will not be able to make a sequel to his fictional game because the rights no longer belong to him, but to Zaum UK.
well at least kurvitz still has some claim over the IP so no cursed amazon TV show yet
haha i saw you comment that right as i was replyign to someone else with the same thing
I’m morbidly curious about what the show would look like tbh lmao
the article mentions apparently "Kompus was approached by suitors who wanted to buy Disco Elysium. These were big, well-known companies like Microsoft and Tencent. They were tempted by the prospect of producing a sequel to the menu game".
imagine the insanity that would've been
My conspiracy theory: Amazon bought the rights to the show not to make it, but to prevent anyone from ever making a disco elysium show since wild pines is kind of a stand in for Amazon, and in the right hands, the show could make people sympathetic to unions.
I don’t have time to read this before work, but Jesus how wild is all this shit from a relatively smaller studio that made a successful but still pretty niche game lol
i forgot it was early morning in USA. important part about who actually owns Disco Elysium right now
These rights are held by the British company Zaum UK, nicknamed Zuk.
The head of Zaum UK is Ilmar Kompus. He owns a fifth of the company. But it turns out that in the case of intellectual property, the deal can be blocked by Robert Kurvitz, the inventor of the game. The same cell who was shown the door...
This means that Kompus will not be able to freely sell "Disco Elysium" because Kurvitz could block the deal. At the same time, Kurvitz will not be able to make a sequel to his fictional game because the rights no longer belong to him, but to Zaum UK.
What a clusterfuck this whole situation is. Everything is basically in a stalemate bc reasons lol I hate copyright law.
I hope kurvitz will be able to wrestle the rights of his creation from these ghouls at some point
yes it's good.
he bought a short story and 4 sketches for £1 and them resold them for €4.8 million to buy out ZA/UM shareholders. his shares have been frozen in the court case currently.
According to Kender's lawyers, Kompus's company Tütreke acquired the four sketches mentioned above and some talk about them in order to raise the money. This was described as intellectual property for the future computer game Pioneer One.
Kompus's company paid a total of one pound sterling, or just over a euro, for the sketches and resold them to Zaum Studio for €4.8 million.
So millions were pumped out of the studio to buy a stake in the same studio.
This is... remarkably similar to what happens in the Ultraliberal visionquest. Buying Cindy's art for a Real and selling it to the Mega-Rich Light-Bending Guy to get a massive Net Worth
I haven't yet discounted the possibility that this entire story is an avante garde marketing scheme for the next game.
I do not understand the structure of this illegal deal. So how does him selling sketches to ZA/UM buy out the shareholders?
wait sorry i said no money actually left or went in to ZA/UM but i think that's wrong. I guess the money was just taken right out of ZA/UM and put into Margus Linnamäe's hands.
From what I understand.
The largest shareholder of ZA/UM at the time, Margus Linnamäe, left the company. The earliest agreement was for his shares to be distributed among the shareholders when he left. But, apparently "the studio's articles of association allow the shareholders to sell the shares to each other as they see fit" so Linnamäe sold his shares to Ilmar Kompus letting him become the majority shareholder.
The problem is where he got that money to buy the shares from Linnamäe. Kompus's company "Tütreke" got the four sketches from ZA/UM for what's described as "intellectual property for the future computer game Pioneer One". The company got them for £1, then they were resold to ZA/UM for €4.8 million. That was the money Ilmar Kompus used to buy the shares from Margus Linnamäe.
from the article:
So millions were pumped out of the studio to buy a stake in the same studio.
So no money actually left or went into ZA/UM it was just swapped hands between a few people leaving Ilmar Kompus as the "director and largest shareholder of Zaum Studio". No idea who he is but the article says he's "known mainly through Sky radio and his real estate company".
That's the alleged fraud. Sorry if my explanation is bad or hard to follow but that's what I think's going on.
Just make a new game anyway. They can intellectually property their FACE with my FIST. :gigachad-hd:
