What is Disco Elysium about? A lot of things, I suppose. It’s about failure, about loss, about redemption, about being a mess of ungovernable nerves and hormones, and it’s about communism—a struggle against a drab, alienating, and interminable now we’ve all inhabited since, oh, the ’80s at least.

It’s also, under its current stewards at ZA/UM, about lucrative merchandising. Thus, the €159 (about $165) Eternal Carrier plastic bag you can currently pick up at ZA/UM Atelier based on the tremendously stylish ‘Yellow Plastic Bag Frittte!’ you can get in order to collect trash for spare change in the game. It’s been pointed out by Rock Paper Shotgun, but it’s been on sale for a couple of months now.

Atelier is the label that also launched these fantastic jackets inspired by Kim Kitsuragi’s designs in the salad days of 2021, and the bag is, apparently, “the last carrier bag you’ll ever need”. They’re said to be “exceptionally lightweight yet incredibly tough” (same) and are made in Estonia from “Dyneema® composite fabric.”

What is Dyneema® composite fabric, you ask? Well, Dyneema® composite fabric “is up to 15x stronger than steel on a weight-for-weight basis and provides the highest tear and tensile strength of any competing materials.” That’s stronger than Kevlar, apparently.

So that’s handy. The next time I’m called to war at Asda, I can just slot my hands through the handles and equip it as a sort of rudimentary armor.

It’s such a patently ridiculous thing—a €159 replacement for those bags that cost me 30p when I forget to bring an old one to Tesco—that I struggle to feel any emotion about it besides bewilderment. But let me try anyway. Yes, past Atelier/Disco Elysium merchandise hasn’t exactly been sold at proletarian prices, but they were also custom clothes crafted by skilled artisans. These are plastic bags. Dyneema® bags, sorry.

And maybe I’d just chuckle at the absurdity of it, but it’s hard not to look at this through the lens of the current issues surrounding ZA/UM and the myriad creators it has pushed out or laid off in the years since the game’s original release.

The game’s lead writer, Robert Kurvitz, has long been distanced from the company along with other studio luminaries like Helen Hindpere and Aleksander Rostov, claiming they effectively took the company from under Kurvitz and crew using underhanded tactics.

Thus, it’s challenging not to see the pricey bag—available in both FALN and Frittte variants—as a cynical cash grab: a sneering conversion of something with emotional and spiritual significance into something of purely monetary value. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Not just mine, evidently. DE fans have not responded well to the announcement of the bag. “This is the level of greed they talk about in the Bible,” said a Reddit user named luseen_. “Capital has the ability to consume all critiques into itself. Even those who would critique capital end up reinforcing it instead,” quotes onion_offense from the game (and also from Guy Debord, more or less). “That’s comically ultraliberal,” says coralfire.

I’d be curious to know how many bags ZA/UM Atelier has sold.