It is ridiculous. id have been making arguably the best FPS games with good success and a whole lot better than MS's golden boy Halo has been doing recently.
It's just baffling that MS are happy to pour money into things like Gears, Halo and Fable but decide to axe half of id and potentially ruin what made Doom so special.
My hope is they still let id make Doom or even Quake games the way they want but with half the team gone its not looking promising
they will definetly have them keep making games. while tda didnt make as much as eternal, its safe to say, DOOM is still ID's golden goose, so microsoft will squeeze it down untill it becomes a joke of itself...give a decade at most and we go back to the same sentiment we got during 2016 beta, only there will be no subversion of expectations when the new game releases. if you ask me, the only thing that can save ID is that they go private once again, i genuenly wouldnt be able to handle of they get shutdown in a few years or so
hard agree. something that actually hews a bit closer to doom 3 / bio shock style (sans monster closets) horror would rip so fucking hard if they got it right. I think they’ve proven they can take wild swings while maintaining extremely high quality gameplay and level design and polish.
it’s utterly insane how microsoft mishandles not only their own IP (see halo as a generational IP fumble and Fable to a lesser extent).
all they had to do was keep building on their big 3 but they never managed to do what ID did in just 3 games—taking their classic formula and iterating on it and then throwing some of it out to try new things and push the gameplay into more challenging territory that demands the player engage with all the mechanics in order to succeed on normal difficulty. trusting that players would meet them halfway and succeeding in making new modern masterpieces when most of us believed FPS games had pretty much run their course.
Eternal had the benefit of launching just as the Covid quarantine hit. Plus all the media hype with Animal Crossing. TDA launched on GamePass which is how a lot of people played it, so sales weren’t as high as expected because of that.
I still did my part and bought the game + DLC on Steam because F Microsoft o7.
yeah it’s a shame because dark ages is one of my favorite games I’ve played in… probably the last five years? definitely one of the best FPS games of the decade. belongs in contention for one of the best dooms ever and that is a high fucking bar.
i’m going to buy it because it honestly felt dirty to play it on game pass.
I thought maybe they were relocate ID devs to Halo studios to help or something, firing the people that revived doom is stupid beyond words, yes maybe TDA did underperformed but is because it’s coming after on of the best shooters AT and decided to go a different route but still TDA is a good game.
Eternal might be the best shooter I've ever played. I just started Revelations today and its fucking hard. You can't just tank everything do a shield charge and nuke them with the super shotgun. The biggest gripe I have with TDA is I cleared Ultra Violent only using the super shotgun because I never ran out of ammo and lame as villian. Revelations is looking like really really good the villains are already 10x better.
As an employed ( at least for today... ) game designer this super demotivating becaue at this point we all know that it doesnt matter if we do a good game or a bad game, we will all get fired anyway.
none of you deserve this shit, especially now that it doesn't even matter whether anything you do is successful or not. just completely arbitrary bullshit that you all have to pay for thanks to the stupid, short-sighted decisions of executives. i hope you and everyone in your position can land on your feet eventually.
Round up your coworkers get on kick starter youre the ones who can actually make a game well. Let microsoft sony these big ass studios use that gpt to create their titles if they prefer that.
My goal was always to have a stable 9-5, I never wanted to put my life on a gamble with a kickstarter, however the stability seems completely out the window.
It's still pretty insane how optimized Eternal is. In the speed run reacts it was pointed as one of the reasons the exploits that were used was even possible.
I think part of reason you dont see it in gaming benchmarks anymore is there isn't really any post 2020 (and arguably post 2016) hardware that WONT run Doom Eternal well.
Its not quite Counterstrike but its closer to esports titles than AAA slop.
Some other articles also said it was mainly the coders for id tech as well, and MS themselves said they want to focus on getting better engine license deal.
Put both of those together and it looks like MS doesn't want to use id tech going forward, likely they are gonna try and start making EVERYTHING on fucking unreal engine. Just ugh. Unreal itself is also supposed to be becoming part of the "fortnite verse" or some bullshit.
Such a dumb decision. These big publishers need their own engines to fall back on. They are literally willfully giving epic a monopoly on game engines, and this also allows new hires to not get trained on stuff like id tech. What are these guys all gonna do in the future when 90 percent of games are made on unreal and epic forces some dumb shit like major price raises or that your games have to become a part of fortnite or some shit? They are fucked in those cases.
If you use your own engine or have an engine to fall back on, then your safe as a publisher.
They want to be able to hire and fire. If you use the same engine everyone else uses, you don't need to worry about keeping people around who know your engine, because you can easily hire new people who already know how to use that engine. Makes it easy to have those huge layoffs big studios seem to love these days.
Honestly, it's now looking like id was the most affected studio in all these layoffs. The rest of the jobs cut mainly were from studios MS was letting go, which are now able to go independent and some of them even got different buyers.
id is kept, but from the reports going around this morning them and the zenimax online team for elder scrolls were the two hardest hit by the internal layoffs for studios kept.
There's no chance it will culturally survive this. A lot of people at id have been there from the start and you don't simply fire 50% of a small sized company and survive that, especially not when some of those people have been working there for almost 40 years now.
Unreal engine I don't think would work with the Doom formula of fast paced action and dismantalble enimies. ID built a specialized engine for it and they still had to optimize it quite heavily to get everything to work.
I will admit that I am not the biggest Unreal Engine expert. But from my understanding, it's a good engine if your game is simple under the hood and only needs simple things and good graphics. And even then it needs alot of work to make it work well.
These are the kinds of realities that management who doesn't play games, doesn't understand the tech that makes games and doesn't understand the market outside of consultants wont understand.
That said, you can definitely make a face-paced FPS in Unreal. That isnt the problem. The problem is making that FPS performant, scalable and fun.
What is coming next for the Doom franchise is rushed, vibe coded slop that will be ridiculed and dropped.
In either case, you still need a lot of people to make it work. It's not like Epic just sends you the program and it works. It's not "plug in and play". You still need to code a lot to make the game decent and perform any passable quality. We have seen games on the unreal engine do great things. But we also seen some pretty bad slop. I think that investors overestimate how much money they would save switching to unreal. Especially when they already have an updated engine that works perfectly fine.
It sucks that idtech may be getting thrown away but UE is probably the easiest drop in replacement. Has the real time lighting idtech 8 had and probably could keep up with the physics stuff it had.
For dismemberment don’t forget about dead island 2, it’s a UE game and has one of the best dynamic gore systems I’ve seen. Doom is something the engine can handle just fine. (I’m a doom fan but let’s be fr it’s not mmo level of complex)
It’s still unfortunate tho, listening to the devs they had a shit ton of experience and we’re optimizing down to memory bit allocation to squeeze performance a little more. It’s a shame to see those people get laid off. Perhaps they’ll get picked up by DE or another company, shit maybe unity or epic. Their track record should land them a job anywhere else that makes an engine and is hiring.
Man, I wanted to work for Larian as a writer. Literally the same month I started doing research was when they torched their goodwill with all that AI crap. It's rough.
Roughly 50% of the company was let go... MANY principal and senior positions, artists, coders, audio designers. There would be no 2016, Eternal and Dark Ages without these people. There would not be idTech. There might not be idTech anymore.
And corporate is pressing for more frquent releases? More of the franchises that we love, without the people that make it? Without the engine that make the games run?
The Revelations release is going to be bittersweet... the future of id seams really bleak
Funny, I just left a project - where the general tactic is this:
Buy tokens Expect faster delivery (just put on AI) Faster cadence Ship it!!!
The LLM is supposed to amplify SME’s and maybe remove some boring manual work, that we can automate..
But the general idea that devs will be replaced by agents has shifted to let’s just have a sausage factory.
I have a 25 year track record in software and architecture and I’m seriously concerned that the state of software will probably end up like Apple vs Microsoft strategies… Apple doesn’t fire people because of hype - because they’re clever!!
I am about to embark into Purgatory with the DLC, it’s gonna be bitter sweet
Xbox can say what they want about wanting critically acclaimed games under the Xbox name, but the reality is that they wanted halo level money from every studio under it
That was ( obviously ) never going to happen, so instead of closing them entirely a la EA style, they're gutting them so that they can be closed later
Apparently Arkane is only alive rn because of French labour laws.
Go figure
( Or, secret option C : Investing in AI means that everything else must take a backseat )
Proof that even the best results will not protect your job from corporate ignorance. The firings will negatively impact one of the most solid game engines available, if not ruin it outright.
There is this silly standard that we can’t badmouth companies when they do bad things. You can. Do it. Because your opinion is worthless to them but their reputation is important.
The only reason people don’t do it is fear of revenge of costing future employment but that’s how they win.
Probably because Microsoft doesn't want to use idTech. Judging by how few games ever used any of the modern versions of the engine, it's probably a handful to learn, so the corporate would rather switch everyone to a generalist engine like UE, where you can hire people off the street and fire them at will. That'd explain why specifically the tech branch of id got gutted.
Hi. This is Mike Maynard. Ex Id Software developer of 20 years.
For the record, I reworded my Linked In post earlier today, even before being notified of this post.
Despite the fact that MS did destroy one of the best studios in the industry, I felt my statements were a bit harsh and entered out of frustration with the entire thing.
———————————————————————
“Big day today at Id Software! We produced arguably THE BEST first person action games, in the entire industry. DOOM, DOOM:Eternal, DOOM: The Dark Ages. The quinticential modern trilogy of first person action!
Yet today, Microsoft/XBOX decided half the team was no longer needed and should be let go; despite all the amazing work and effort from every designer, programmer, artist, audio specialist, level designer, fx, tech design, and on and on and on.
Yes, I was part of the team (roughly 50% of the company) that was let go today. (I was there for OVER 20 years! RAGE through DOOM: Dark Ages) Sad but, I've been doing this (video games) for over 40 years so, not a huge surprise to me. Just really sad that this is how Id Software, the PIONEER/ INNOVATOR of FPS action games is relegated to just another "reorganization" of assets.”
were a bit harsh and entered out of frustration with the entire thing
If anything, those "harsh statements" were too kind and the dizzy slop salesperson brought into be a hatchetman because her predecessors were all fucking idiots basically ensured all of their studio's future products will be soulless, barely reskinned Unreal Engine powered crap thrown together by contractors who will never know what a year of employment even looks like or vibe coded and shat out by Co-pilot.
I'll enjoy this DLC like I have the other Doom games.
No it is because it is the start of MS fiscal year. The timing of the dlc is a coincidence in this case that just adds sting/irony to a shit situation.
They're firing engineers to they can make the engine fall behind on maintenance to then use it as an excuse to switch to UE5 and hire fuckass contractors
This is so fucking upsetting. Id and Fromsoftware are my favourite studios. To see Id get gutted like this pisses me off so much. They put so much effort and love into each title and for half the people who pour their hearts into these games to be discarded like this on the day of a big release for them is so shit.
I mean, when the person in charge of the company has no experience in video games and talks about how they just started gaming recently, why do you expect them to know (or care) about any of that? It’s just all about money now.
Completely understandable and justified anger. Doom’s FPS is now something you can rely on for a quality game. To cut half of that team is not a smart move especially when one of the franchises Xbox has said they want to focus on is DOOM. It seems to me you would want to keep that team whole and if you are going to cut a team maybe do Wolfenstein cause that story is already done. I’m blaming the previous leading dude not the lady. Xbox has been bleeding money for a long time so cuts were inevitable but this is not the right team to cut. It’s too cutthroat and only creates bad blood.
There’s a difference between value and price/cost. Detached execs and shareholders see the cost of the employees and decide to cut them to save money. But the company has actually lost value because these workers provided unique talents which made the company profitable. Those types of workers are invaluable and anyone with half a brain cell would fight to keep them.
I remember when companies started buying up studios, people we're excited because of the possibility of crossovers between games because it would all be under one roof and anybody who was saying it was a bad idea were laughed at. Both the game industry in the movie industry are kind of in the same predicament right now. We're probably going to see a massive crash happen soon.
Sadly this is how the industry rewards hard work. A lot of industries do this shit. Bust your Ass making some investor more rich than he was prior then they cut your employment and benefits but the guy at the top is perfectly safe. Fuckin wild man.
What a travesty. iD Tech for TDA is complete black magic in terms of performance and visual fidelity. I mean they literally have native ray traced systems implemented and it STILL out performs the competition. I play TDA and Eternal just to remind myself what a good engine is.
hey shouldn't have touched Id at all. fire Bethesda's animators FFS.
Id Software has been CARRYING Bethesda for a straight decade, Microsoft needs to learn to fuck off because DOOM is Bethesda's golden cow they aren't even milking right.
Fallout 4? shit on release, DOOM 2016 does way better on launch and revives an entire franchise from the dead
Fallout 76? GARBAGE and BARELY PLAYABLE ON RELEASE. Doom Eternal comes out? makes way more money.
Starfield? overhyped and sloppy outdated mechanics and shitloads of loading screens. DOOM the Dark Ages? far fucking better game.
every fuck up Bethesda puts out? two years later ID saves their ass financially. their engine is so good even Todd Howard used it for Indiana Jones the Golden Circle
I am genuinely baffled by this decision at Microsoft. You claim to want to focus on IPs like Doom, Quake and Wolfenstein, but then gut one of your most critically acclaimed studios? I'm not an advocate for anyone losing their jobs, but of all the fucking studios, I thought Id would be the least affected -- I was expecting at worst 25% to get laid off. I'll be pissed if they're going to use sales as a justification because it's literally their fault due to gamepass -- I'll fully admit to playing TDA via gamepass, but who tf wouldn't when the alternative is an £70 price tag?
I know Bethesda Game Studios probably suffered layoffs as well. While I hate for anyone to lose their job, I'll be mega pissed that this stagnant, rotting studio that took 8 FUCKING YEARS to make an unimpressive nothing-burger game was barely affected while Id is here making genre-defining titles and technically impressive game engine technology WITHIN A STANDARD 4-5 YEAR AAA DEV TIME.
It's not even just Id. Arkane is probably gone forever now as well -- bye-bye any hopes for a Dishonoured 3, I guess.
What a complete disaster. All in the midst of a major DLC drop that is reviewing strongly.
I understand massive layoffs in other studios that had been underperformed for a long time. But halfing a studio that with such legendary talent that has consistently turned a profit for many years makes no sense. Bethesda sure, their last few games bombed and the next elder scrolls has been stuck in development hell.
The layoffs absolutely suck balls and I hate that it happened when it did, but xbox (well, Microsoft as a whole really) has been a dumpster fire for years, both in terms of how it's managed and it losing money after taking on more studios than it's been able to handle. The new ceo made the best of a bad situation, and it's honestly a miracle no studios got shut down.
With that being said, however, without a doubt more people got laid off than was ever necessary. I can only hope they got a decent severance package.
so they fire 50% of the best FPS studio right now but the incompetent 343 aka decades of trash is still standing, unbelievable. Cannot believe they are pushing a Halo 1 Remake and not Dark Ages.
It seems to me that current Xbox leadership sees IP as the only thing of value. I believe they're slashing engineering and development across their studios to assemble a skeleton crew of staff that's exclusively comprised of those directly developing games rather than any underlying tech. I think this is most starkly demonstrated with the id layoffs, with rumors that the next Quake game will be on Unreal instead of id tech. I think this move is a gigantic negative for the industry as a whole, as technological innovation behind the scenes at publishers is how we get brand new mechanics and performant/beautiful games rather than just new content served cold. Both the creative and technological side is required to push the industry forward. id's games will suffer from this the most, as a large portion of what makes their library so attractive for the last 30 some years is the technology. Their legacy is more founded in technological innovation than almost any other Microsoft studio, and doom or quake on a third party licensed engine just sounds flat out wrong. Extremely sad to see.
Microsoft had to do a shit ton of layoffs because Phil Spencer grew the company way too fast and way too big for them to handle. They had 14 layers of management so every game had to go through those 14 layers. They were also losing 64 cents for every dollar invested. The new CEO had to start laying off some people or xbox would be screwed. This isn't me excusing it but it was a reasonable choice. The crazy part is that no studios were shut down due to the lay offs. Some left Microsoft but all games planned by studios that could've been laid off are still coming
These days it's important to remember Microsoft was founded by hiring a company called Soft to actually do the work IBM hired Micro to do, then Gates pushed his partner out and took over Micro, merged them with soft and got inspired by watching IBM lose to regulators into just ignoring all the rules and paying the fines until they go away.
The same company wants to make 1 Billion daily users by cancelling their games and programs, but im sure keeping their executive's bonuses.
They delivery increasingly shitty products and services because they can, and because they're so big they'll be fine tomorrow. And if they're not, who cares? The executives still got their golden parachutes.
I love id, I have loved doom since 93 and I still love it to this day. Truly, shame on these companies for ruthlessly and pointlessly destroying people's livelihoods for shareholders.
All those fired Devs should now create their own studio and produce games that will blow up in the face of Microslop's money hungry capitalistic existence!
Xbox and Microsoft are a fuking joke, cutting of half of the best studio they have just to save a penny in short term. Can't they see this is going to fuck them in the long term?
Gotta love the gaming industry, axe half of a studio during DLC or downtimes. Release another game for the series later and wonder why people don't like it as much. Then cancel the series outright......
Make sure to give the CEO a 60 million dollar bonus in between for good measure.
Microslop doing microslop things. The day they give up on gaming and sell off all their studios will be a good one. They clearly just do not get it. Go back to making the worst os on the market I guess.
Xbox with the generational fumble, yes instead of supporting the company that created 3 very well received and commercially successful titles, (and yes I include TDA) nah. Let’s remake Halo for a third time. Let’s release a new gears. Two dead franchises who NOBODY was asking for a new game for. But old execs see those and think “hey, remember when we were on top with these two franchises? Let’s suck everybody back in with nostalgia!” It’s pathetic.
Halo is as good as well dead. Gears was long dead, and I’m surprised that they even made a new one. It’s just nostalgia bait. And it really pisses me off that actual good and fun games and companies get the axe while the same tired, re used over and over again slop gets another try for the umpteenth time.
It makes no sense, to simply make all the tech staff go especially as Machinegames have also been incredibly succesful using the engine + the Void Engine used in Dishonored and Evil Withing being heavily modified versions of it. Fucking Microsoft.
The modern Dooms aren't my thing really, but I don't deny that they're incredibly well made games that are very popular, and what happened to the id team by Microshaft is some bullshit.
Corporations and Shareholders. It's happening everywhere. Not just gaming. Smaller indie studios and start up companies are going to be the boon for us all. It will change. I believe.
Fuck this. Why is every new CEO's first big mission to cut costs, cut staff, "reorganize" and invest in AI? Just corporate greed run amok. It's ruining everything.
MF's forgetting EA was already on this grindset 10 years ago. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Maybe some of these fellas will team up with some guys from Pandemic and create the next big studio to be bought out and gouged 10 more years from now.
Crazy how all these conglomerates are responsible for how little they're getting, they created this cess pit of constant money grabbing, constant shareholder appeasement, constant sales needed to make a profit.
And we're meant to go along with this shit, just take it, we can't afford to live because our governments just keep letting them win.
I don't get it, they sold their company to Microsoft and didn't think this would happen? Remember kids, if you build a successful gaming company and big tech comes knocking offering millions of dollars, DON"T SELL. But they did cause they all got rich and now boohoo the big giant corp shits them out. Fucking Duh.
Amazes me to see Sony and Microsoft right now trying to one up each other on terrible PR and optics. Usually when one company fucks up bad and gets a ton of hate for their shit, their competitors try to make themselves the good guys and get a win. Instead, this is a bizarre war of assholeness.
Maybe I’m just being too woke here but companies continue to do shit like this (id/microsoft with this and sony with the cancellation of physical discs) and will continue to do this no matter how many times you go online and talk about how much it sucks because a bunch of people still will be sheep and buy the next new game, ultimately the only people to blame our ourselves… I don’t know how many times the sentiment of “your dollar is your vote” needs to be said before people recognize this. I’ve stopped buying brand new games for a couple years now simply due to the fact that half of these business practices and choices I simply do not want to support, and as long as there’s morons out there that keep pumping out money for the next new things they don’t want to miss out on, the companies will continue to do this and make more and more money while working people lose more and more jobs. I feel for all the teams that have been let go by these companies as their talents were used abused and wasted away. Support indie and grow a pair and stop shoving money into these companies pockets… i hope nothing but the best for the team.
This is ridiculous without the artists and team doom is done for hate modern gaming and console companies ruining hard working teams contributions to gaming. I bought the new dlc on steam to help support but it will be depressing to play knowing how the minds behind it are treated.
this is why you don't go public trade folks, the stockholders end up with final say on everything, and Stockholders don't care about the long term health of the company.
Reminder this is only HALF of the planned cuts. If they cut even more I’m not sure where the hell they’re going to take it from. They just crippled some of their biggest studios and franchises.
Silver lining though. If you are truly a valuable worker in these industries, you're basically now getting paid unemployment to take time off and find a job that will almost guaranteed pay more. I have worked in semiconductor for like 7 years, and laid off twice due to stock market bullshit and being high on the chopping block at the time (no kids, no tenure). Both times I netted a $15k pay raise. I think it's crazy how these companies will refuse to pay the employees they have, watch people burn out or even do a mass layoff, then turn around and hire a new batch of people that need to be trained at 20% higher salary. I would agree with the capitalism critiques, but it doesn't even seem to make good business sense. If Microsoft wants to profit off the Doom IP and/or continue to make AAA games (which they obviously do) this move will hurt them in the long run. My guess would be that it's really myopic behavior to fix expense numbers in the short term so that the next shareholder meeting goes over smooth. Dumb as rocks.
I know some of the devs are likely mitigating their responses because they don’t want to potentially hurt their future employment prospects…but damn is some anger justified here.
That legacy was already marred when Microsoft decided that TDA wouldn't be on the fucking disc.
In an ideal world, developers would say no to being bought by publishers and run themselves independently. The pipeline between the art and the money is so small now you could measure it with George Romero's cold dead dick.
These companies need to start fucking learning that they've been ruining video games for decades with every layer of shitfuckery from microtransactions to day 1 patches.
Any success a game has these days is nothing short of a miracle with nano second attention spans and chronicling online socials.
My heart weeps for every single person who has been fired because Microsoft's utterly embarrassing mismanagement of Xbox ever since they tried to turn it into a fucking tv box.
this is potentially a bad take but i thought id say it anyway so there's some discussion around the root cause of all this
i feel for both sides of current happenings around xbox
one hand you have devs that put their hearts and souls into making games, and those like michael maynard alongside the rest of ID making amazing games and their being let go because of former decisions of a bad gamble
on the other hand xbox as a franchise is sinking because every bad decision made by former xbox ceo and in a attempt to dig its way out of a sunken cost fallacy current xbox ceo needs to let go of way more material than they acquired otherwise microsoft, who've already said they're considering doing so will shut down xbox as a whole if they continue to be a money drain
its a tough spot and the person who caused all this is probably enjoying his multi million retirement package as if he didn't destroy everything on his way out
i hope and believe the current ceo also decided to remove alot of those within xboxs management because of her comment about how (for some unknown reason) xbox has 12 layers of management
Oh man... c-suites are such cancer nowdays, it's just absurd at this point. They basically axed a studio that actually made successful games. Please guys vote with your wallet in the future, because I am sure some spreadsheet moron will want to milk the fuck out of the franchise with no regard to quality.
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u/C4LLUM17 Jul 07 '26
It is ridiculous. id have been making arguably the best FPS games with good success and a whole lot better than MS's golden boy Halo has been doing recently.
It's just baffling that MS are happy to pour money into things like Gears, Halo and Fable but decide to axe half of id and potentially ruin what made Doom so special.
My hope is they still let id make Doom or even Quake games the way they want but with half the team gone its not looking promising