So I am watching the video for the whole split/firing of Robert Kurvitz, Aleksander Rostov, and Helen Hindpere and I have some (?) things to say. Essentially my view on this is that Robert was honestly a horrible person to work under as well as a very exclusive prick to those he worked with, not really treating those outside of his inner circle kindly, however, that doesn't also mean that it is incorrect to say that him as well as Aleksander and Helen didn't get the short end of the stick and have the company taken from them. Honestly, I think it's not like Robert, Helen, and Rostov were innocent but that the people that managed them were setting them up to fail so that they could be easily gotten rid of.
Nonetheless, I think that Ilmar Kompas is still a huge fucking scheming asshole who was doing a lot of really shady shit. Although removing Robert from a position of power could be viewed as a good idea to some degree, but I think that entirely firing him, Helen, and Rostov from the company was horrible to do . It is entirely cutting them out of a creative IP that they played a huge part of and now will be unable to touch or have ownership of anything they may have contributed/made. Kompas absolutely was doing shady stuff with investments and was without a doubt exploitating people who were already recovering from the excessive crunch from the previous game they were developing. Burnout isn't just something you get over, it's something you have to build up to. I sincerely believe that working on a smaller project, not related to the extremely prolific IP that would be so taxing to try to match the output of was a good idea. I think later on in the process, Kompas was attempting to get rid of them because they were no longer useful to him because why wait now to say that Robert is so abusive and horrible when he could of easily gotten rid of him at the height of his toxicity rather than when he was too exploited and burned out to be able to help create the art that was making the big heads so much money. Again, I am not justifying Robert's behavior, but it just feels like Kompas was waiting to get rid of a thorn in his side regarding the buy-out.
I'm going to be honest, Robert most definitely created a toxic working environment to employees and I genuinely hope that those employees can experience solace. I think that criticism should be a little more gentle because of the amount of stress caused on individual creatives within the larger team, not because they can't handle tough love but because they're working their asses off and that he should not have been making them feel like they had to completely redo all their work. Perhaps the game would have been different if he was nicer, perhaps it would have been worse, maybe better, but his behavior was nonetheless cruel to those working under him as they are people who are under tremendous crunch. The creative industry is often VERY rough on everyone who works in it as seen in indie animation, game development, and even films occasionally, and I strongly believe that it has to change for the better because people shouldn't have to feel so burned out that it sends them to the hospital or even causes them to work tremendous overtime without pay and instead with more stress. Robert simply has his head in the clouds more often than not about how development works, viewing himself as a bigger piece than he is, rather than viewing himself as part of a team creative effort, and due to his idea of putting the product before himself, he is willing to do the same with those working under him towards his goals. He is an asshat most definitely and should have worked harder to read those socialist texts to realize that he is part of collective rather than the single driving force as they are all but each a thread in the whole blanket that is the creation of Disco Elysium and it's successors.
Robert and Helen were additionally very much incompetent in their leadership role, this is seen during the time of Final Cut and especially after it was completed. This is probably mostly due to the crunch time having impacted them to an extreme degree. It was very clear that they were fucking burned the hell out, just like all the people working under them and that perhaps they were not fit for leadership roles, and it probably completely messed with them mentally. And while that doesn't mean that they earn any sort of sympathies that should be granted to them over their cohorts and those that worked under them, it does mean a lot to why they were probably not the most efficient in what they were doing. Helen was most definitely pushed off a glass cliff with the way that she was promoted much later when she was worn from her work on the 2019 version of DE, most likely set up to fail by the lack of communication between her and upper management. This is what most likely lead to her not being able to act as an appropriate lead writer on the project and not communicate very well with her team herself.
Moreover, it is at least quite peculiar that a lot of the 2 year period where Aleksander and Robert were checked out of the work was around when the situation regarding the shareholders seemed to be turning schisming (if that's the right word), that a lot of their mismanagement seemed to be, strangelty becuase of higher management leaving them high and dry while they were in dire need of communication at the time. Again, Justin was complaining about how Helen was uncommunicative about deadlines and that seemed to match up with how she herself was not being kept up with on what the deadlines were until it was most definitely going to cause her to seem like an even more incompetent boss. Like I feel like the three of them were definitely have disunity in communication with those working below them and I feel like they could have been a lot more honest with those they were in charge of, it just also has the added layer of them also having to deal with higher management also most likely setting them up to fail and cause worse crunch times.
I took a bit of a dive into the comments and a lot of people were discussing how a lot of the big head business people were entirely manipulating the creatives on the team to make them seem worse and additionally were extremely corrupt in how they handling every business aspect of the game including deadlines. Even the way that Ilmar kind of pressured the people still in the company to speak on a topic they clearly didn't want to speak on is clear as they had stayed relatively silent preceding this video. A user (@/L1vv4n) even discusses how the behavior of these men stem from how doing business in the late Soviet Union to the early 90s was a mesh of scheming around the corners to work through loopholes due to the system being unweildy, corrupt, and almost entirely non-functional. Additionally, the way Robert descibes Kaur and Ilmar convincing him to sign over the rights of the IP to ZA/UM seems a lot like two business men who were acutely aware of how business/legally unaware he was as the IP owner. I feel like Kaur especially was a huge source of conflict in the further development of the Disco Elysium IP with the way he didn't communicate with either of the three people who were in charge of development teams for the game, that he kind of played a bigger part in their downfall.
However, let's face it, the three were simply not around after the original release of DE, which lead to a bigger strain on the people working below them, especially Justin and Kaspar who had to pick up from where they seemed to hang them all dry, who were going through way more than they were at the time work-wise. None of these 3 people are more than creatives with very big ideas, they are all moving parts of a bigger creative machine, and ultimately had to be better team players and leaders, which brings me great dissatifaction to see them be so horrible to work with. I have nothing but sympathy for those who worked under them as they all got to see the good and the bad of those who were overseeing their creative output. They, especially Robert, should have ALWAYS been doing more hands-on work and helping their staff out so much more with stuff haviung to deal with Final Cut. They could have, again, had better communication with those on their teams, it feels like they were kind of just leaving their people out of the loop. It infuriates me the fact that these people had to have to deal with the emotional distraught of literally having to pick up the slack of the people who were supposed to be their bosses, not even just because of those supposed bosses but because it seemed like the people even higher wanted to set them up to fail. Helen, Aleksander, and Robert absolutely should not have gone on vacation while the people under them had to work, it was not right, and I'm giving them a lot of leeway even now, believing what they have to say because I don't want to believe the worst in these people who very clearly care a lot about their IP, but regardless the facts are that they left their employees to feel like they were in a drought of knowledge about what they were supposed to do which made those people go through even worse hell.
Although I am talking a lot about the creatives (as their actions were the focus of the video) I hope that you can also see what that means for the people working under them and how not just these three creatives were set up but ultimately how the people working above them had a hand in causing extreme suffering on those that worked beneath the three they were trying to build a case to remove. Think about how this is still a story about how greedy business men who wanted to make more money and get rid of the biggest creatives on the team ultimately caused for even worse crunch times for those smaller people. I honestly do not care that much about Helen, Aleksander, and especially Robert, but I do have to say that the crux of this issue is not on them and how they kind of lowkey sucked, but the UK and EU capital that were killing this team just to chew up and spit out three people from the company. Even so, as aptly put in another comment (this one by @/ocularosis), "'Workers Rights' means rights for ALL workers, not just workers who are nice people," and people working in the dev room like Justin, Kaspar, Helen, Rostov, and even Robert, deserve rights, to their intellectual property, to a fair share of what they create, and the wealth/value created from their work.
uhhh sorry for writing the world's most disorganized word vomit essay that I might edit after a full night's sleep

