The full impact of the recent Xbox layoffs is proving to be more devastating than expected, as roughly half of Doom developer id Software is said to be gone.
While no studios were shut down as part of Xbox’s latest round of layoffs, roughly 3,200 people have lost their jobs, meaning the company has let go over 9,000 employees in just the last few years.
There are several reasons for why this is so upsetting, beyond the obvious, one of them being that many of these people will never work in video games again and will take any institutional knowledge with them, which will only make development at Xbox and the industry at large much harder.
Nothing best exemplifies this than how id Software, the studio behind the Doom games, has been impacted. While it was previously reported that it had suffered ‘significant cuts,’ it’s since been claimed that roughly half of the entire studio is no longer there.
In the wake of the layoffs, Scott Miller, co-founder of Apogee Software/3D Realms, posted on X that he had heard that the majority of id Software had been let go, including ‘most (if not all) coders.’
Apogee’s other co-founder George Broussard later posted that 50% of the studio – about 95 or so employees – had been let go and even went as far as to say that despite not being closed, id Software is effectively dead: ‘Tools, programming (except a couple), Quake Champions team, testing team. All gone.’
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Game Developer has now corroborated these assertions, saying it’s been told by multiple sources that over 90 people were let go and the Q&A department in particular has been severely impacted.
It’s not an exaggeration to say this is nothing short of vandalism and especially upsetting when id Software is not only one of the oldest studios in the business (it was founded in 1991) but it essentially created the first person shooter genre as we know it.
The early Doom and Wolfenstein games were also technologically revolutionary, and id has continued to build upon its bespoke game engine to this day.
Not only has it been used for the Doom games, but other titles across Microsoft and Bethesda studios, including MachineGames’ Wolfenstein games and Indiana Jones And The Great Circle.
If roughly half of id is now gone, and almost all coders, that means there’s no one left with any understanding of the studio’s tech, so it can’t even really operate as a support studio.
It’s especially galling when Microsoft and Xbox apparently still want more Doom, Wolfenstein, and Quake games, which could very well be moved over to a different game engine like Unreal.
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The job cuts also stand to impact future plans for Doom: The Dark Ages. It received what has been described as its first DLC expansion today, but id may be forced to cut back on any further DLC now it has less manpower.
id Software’s co-founder John Romero has expressed condolences to impacted employees and said he hopes people are doing what they can to preserve id’s work.
In a Bluesky thread, Romero writes, ‘id’s history is critically important to the history of games. I’ve preserved id’s complete early history from our start at Softdisk through to August 6, 1996, including materials and assets that, as far as I know, id itself no longer has.
‘I hope someone is doing the same for the company’s ongoing legacy (the work, code, assets, stories and the people behind them).’
As a reminder, Romero currently runs Romero Games with his wife Brenda Romero and their next game was meant to be funded by Microsoft, but the company pulled out last year, resulting in the game’s cancellation.
This also led to layoffs at Romero Games, and it was believed to have shut down entirely, though the studio would later refute this: ‘Romero Games is not closed, and we are doing everything in our power to ensure that it does not come to that. Any suggestion otherwise is factually incorrect.’
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