Some developers at id Software say they spent months crunching on the new Doom: The Dark Ages expansion Revelations. It finally arrived this week with a 10-hour campaign aimed at hardcore series veterans. The day before it launched, roughly half of the studio was invited to a conference call to be told they were getting laid off. The scale of the cuts was devastating and has left many worried about how id Software can continue, and confused about Xbox’s plans for its future.
id Software had come away relatively unscathed in Xbox’s previous mass layoffs. But on the morning of July 6, studio head Marty Stratton wrote in the office Slack for people not to come into work that day, three sources said. An hour later, the meeting invites arrived. Some were still commuting through Dallas traffic when they tried to log in to the brief call to hear Stratton say that their roles had been eliminated.
It wasn’t their fault, or a reflection on them, that they were part of the 3,200 layoffs across Xbox happening over the next 12 months, he said in remarks that lasted less than a few minutes. While feelings of betrayal were to be expected, more surprising was the realization of just how bad the studio had been hit. Even employees who had been at the storied studio for decades were suddenly being cut loose. Jerry Keehan, a designer going back to 2004’s Doom 3, was among them.
A WARN Notice filed in Texas, first reported by Game Developer, confirmed 158 layoffs at Xbox subsidiary ZeniMax Media from across the state. 96 of those layoffs happened at the id Software office in Richardson where the studio’s been located since 2011, with an additional 40 remote staff who report to there let go as well. Key positions were cut and entire teams were decimated, three sources told Kotaku. This included the team in charge of id Tech, the studio’s long-standing proprietary game engine for the Doom franchise. Sources said only one employee on that team is believed to be left.
One source wasn’t sure how the studio could even patch the game engine without being forced to call someone who had just been laid off. “The institutional knowledge is just not there,” they claimed. “id Tech as a technology is probably dead forever.” id Software’s Frankfurt office is also involved in maintaining the tool set. It’s unclear if the plan is to try to offload more of that work to the German team or if they will also eventually be cut.
With Revelations out, id Software doesn’t currently have any new games greenlit, two sources said. There was, at one point, an incubation project called “Fury” that involved John Wick-style melee action in first-person, first reported by GamesBeat, but concepts for the next game have kept shifting and are still up in the air. Two sources said there were also plans kicked around for potential multiplayer DLC for Doom: The Dark Ages, though it’s not clear if those will still be pursued either.
Doom isn’t the only franchise that relies on id Tech. A branch of it is used by MachineGames on the Wolfenstein games, including the sequel it’s currently developing. Every so often those branches are merged when one side has tech improvements the other would like access to. One source said some of the most recent improvements occurred during the development of Revelations. Following the cuts to the engine team, they weren’t sure who would be left to help MachineGames get access to them and keep them from going to waste.
Jill Braff, president of Bethesda and casual games at Microsoft, wrote to staff in a memo obtained by IGN that “to best position Bethesda for future growth, we are shifting from a planning model primarily centered on what’s next for each independent studio to one that focuses on our strongest franchises and determining the content roadmap that best serves our players and Bethesda as a whole.”
It’s unclear if Doom is considered one of those “strongest franchises,” and even if it is, sources say it’s hard to imagine how id Software could continue leading it in the state it’s now in. Doom: The Dark Ages garnered over 3 million players in its opening days thanks to Game Pass, but was only estimated to have sold around 1 million copies across Xbox Series X/S, PS5, and PC at launch. Some developers may feel they delivered what Microsoft wanted at the time—great games that would be popular on its Netflix-like subscription service—only to now be punished for it a year later as the business strategy goes through another “reset.”