Civvie 11, the YouTuber at the center of the boomer shooter revival, is not chuffed about the management over at Xbox. In recent weeks, the company mapped out plans to lay off more than 3,000 staff. While they’ve been careful to avoid outright shuttering any of the studios purchased in the last decade, Microsoft has whittled most into brittle twigs. This is especially true of Doom creators id Software, who Civvie credits for making the most influential games of the last ten years.
“Microsoft gambled and lost,” Civvie says in his latest video. “All of the layoffs infuriate me but there’s something especially gross and predatory about bleeding id like this. I know none of the original members are still there. That doesn’t matter. They put out Doom 2016. And Doom Eternal. And Dark Ages, to a lesser extent. Action games that hit so hard that they revived a once-dead franchise and people still talk about how Doom Eternal is the best Doom.”
The latest video is an overall retrospective on Quake expansions, but Civvie would have been remiss not to address the current ails of the studio that created it. Obviously id had created, recreated and reinvented Doom since its influential 1993 debut, but the 2016 version bucked many gaming trends and produced a bulky, brutal, guts-focused and brilliant new vision. Its influence was felt beyond Doom’s gate, buffered by swift, action-heavy first person shooters exhuming the skeletons of the past to build entirely new thrills.
Civvie is something of a historian of the genre’s revival, reviewing the past, present and future of classically-minded shooters with popular videos on Blood, Thief and Cruelty Squad. His most popular video is one on the 2016 version of Doom, so Xbox’s heartlessness towards the studio is bound to be a sore spot.
“A mostly unrestrained id put out some of the best action games ever created and now it’s going the way of all good studios,” says Civvie. “Chopped up, torn apart and forced to be less passionate, less creative, less themselves and beholden to the whims of people who would slit their fucking throats for the next sacrifice, which is gonna happen sometime next quarter. None of this surprises me. This is how everything operates. We have been told our entire lives that business has to be run like this or else we’ll all be poor and starving because the investors will have a money-sad.”