Ex-ZA/UM designers launch Summer Eternal, a player-owned RPG studio giving fans 5% profit share

Summer Eternal is a new RPG studio co-founded by former ZA/UM designers Argo Tuulik and Dora Klindžić, alongside developer and organizer Aleksandar Gavrilović. The studio is structured as a worker-owned cooperative — and it's going further by offering ownership stakes, profit sharing, and genuine democratic governance rights to both freelancers and players.

The player-facing piece is the headline: Summer Eternal is carving out 5% of its profits for a player-run non-profit, giving customers a real vote on the studio's direction rather than just cosmetic community input. Gavrilović frames it explicitly as an attempt to "mend the trust broken in this industry a thousand times over." Full details on the governance model and the profit-directing non-profit are published on the studio's website. The setup draws obvious comparisons to EVE Online's Council of Stellar Management or Old School RuneScape's player polls, but with actual financial stakes attached.

The founding team's background gives the pitch extra weight. Tuulik and Klindžić both worked on a Disco Elysium expansion that ZA/UM ultimately canceled — a project that became a flashpoint for the wider industry conversation about how studios treat creative talent and player goodwill. Worker-owned cooperatives exist in games but remain rare; tying player ownership directly to profit share is rarer still, and arrives at a moment when publicly traded publishers are visibly cutting studios and staff to satisfy shareholder returns.

Summer Eternal's first product is a book — the Summer Eternal Anthology Vol. 1 — split between essays on the state of the games industry (featuring contributors like Dragon Age writer David Gaider and economist and former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis) and a design document formally announcing the studio's debut game, Project Red Rooster. Buying the anthology is how players get in on the ground floor as stakeholders. At the time of writing, it was available for preorder for one more day.