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Doom Developer id Software Is Reportedly Losing Half Its Staff (engadget.com) 63

Posted by BeauHD from the hitting-reset dept.
Doom developer id Software is reportedly laying off about half its staff as part of Microsoft's broader Xbox cuts. The reported layoffs potentially affects around 90 employees. Engadget reports: While neither Microsoft nor id Software have formally acknowledged the layoffs, one former member of the studio's staff, Michael Maynard, has echoed the 50 percent figure on LinkedIn. According to at least one of Game Developer's sources, that could translate to around 90 job cuts, though it's so far unclear what departments at id Software have been hit hardest.

[...] Bloomberg reported yesterday that as part of the "reset" at Xbox, ZeniMax Media, the parent company of id Software, will be focusing on its biggest franchises -- like The Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Wolfenstein and Doom -- going forward. It's possible that motivated the cuts to id Software, but the developer at least outwardly appears to be already heavily focused on Doom. The studio launched Doom: The Dark Ages in 2025 and an expansion to the game on July 7, 2026. Whatever the reason, the cuts at Xbox aren't over: While Microsoft eliminated 1,600 roles alongside the announcement that Xbox is restructuring, it still plans to lay off another 1,600 employees over the coming months.

Doom Developer id Software Is Reportedly Losing Half Its Staff More | Reply

Doom Developer id Software Is Reportedly Losing Half Its Staff

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  • Losing them? (Score:3)

    by outsider007 ( 115534 ) on Tuesday July 07, 2026 @07:05PM (#66227530)

    They know where they are. Their addresses are all on file.

    • Time to join the modern age. (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Instead of hanging on to old tech jobs, maybe these people should learn to code?

      Oh wait...

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by 0123456 ( 636235 )

        It's "Learn to prmpt" these days, dude.

        • My little conspiracy theory on all this is Microsoft central put the order in that everyone has to use vibecoding from now on to write their code, and the ID engineers pushed back because theres no way even the high end Fable type models would be able to handle game engine kernel code. Fuckin thing cant even understand threading properly (At least in my experience) and so HQ decided they where "Unproductive" and fired them.

          Management are in for a rude shock when it comes time to ask Claude to write the next

          • Likely this. I feel the same when it comes to deep C++code I write. These models arent even close.

          • Were Union. I hadn't really noticed that at first until one of the left wing rags I occasionally read pointed it out to me.

            Companies have used layoffs for years to get rid of employees that they legally cannot get rid of but they want to. I remember people getting all excited for years about IBM firing all those managers only to find out when I was an adult that they were just firing older line workers who they had given the title manager to so they can replace them with younger and cheaper workers with

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by leonbev ( 111395 )

        Maybe they should have become Microsoft CoPilot evangelists instead, it probably would have saved their jobs if they used an excessive amount of AI buzzwords.

    • Softening the language does not change the employees from being fired.

      Oh wait, the news source also accepts advertising from games companies.....

  • On the plus side (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ebunga ( 95613 ) on Tuesday July 07, 2026 @07:23PM (#66227570)

    This will free up more resources so they can completely destroy the rest of their businesses.

    • Its weird. I'm pretty sure the games they've been making have been profitable. I guess they think "why not triple the profit by making the games with 1/2 as many people!"

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Gleenie ( 412916 )

        Woooo AI games here we come

        • Woooo AI games here we come

          Of course, with just a touch of polish they are so shiny and gleam. With the consumer push for physical media, wouldn’t you want games made with element 13?

      • ID games? Yes. Xbox studio games overall? Barely. Xbox is repprtedly running a 3% profit margin.

        • "Oh god, we're not making enough money. Quick, fire the people making us the most profit!"

          • With a 3% profit margin, MS would have a better return taking the money they'd spend on the Xbox folks and sticking it into a high-yield savings account at the bank.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jythie ( 914043 )

        That is the odd part about their restructure.. apparently xbox is profitable, but lower margins than their other high margin businesses, so they are cutting it back to have fewer offerings? It reads like they are doing it less for the company or money, and more personal brand since being in charge of nothing but a few well known blockbusters is better social credit than many small titles no one outside gaming has heard of.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      They over-spent during the pandemic, and because AAA games take so long and so much money to develop now, by the time they reached the market the bubble had already burst.

      They are all focused on online subscription/micro transaction stuff as well now, which is why you see games being withdrawn a week after launch when it becomes clear they aren't the next big cash cow. The same as Netflix cancels shows days after release because the initial viewing figures are enough to know that they aren't the next Squid

      • They over-spent during the pandemic, and because AAA games take so long and so much money to develop now, by the time they reached the market the bubble had already burst.

        There is seldom a game which couldn't benefit from more development time. When you choose to throw away effort instead of stretching it out a little more and having a more polished product to offer at a more fortuitous time... well, then you're the games industry in general.

        • Why throw good money after bad? Not every project works out and throwing ever more money into the pit hoping it will eventually pay off requires having some other successful project from which that money must come from. Most studios don't have the kind of money to do that for more than a single game or a small team and if they have to start borrowing there's a good chance that everyone will be out of the job when the game flops or underperforms anyway.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Luthair ( 847766 )
        I think the pandemic is giving Microsoft a pass. This is a direct result of Satya Nadellas services push which led Xbox to create game pass which never made fiscal sense. It even infested games themselves like the whole Crackdown 3 can only do deformable terrain due to the power of the cloud nonsense.

  • A watershed moment (Score:5, Insightful)

    by hutkept ( 10503251 ) on Tuesday July 07, 2026 @07:51PM (#66227590)
    Doom was amazing tech, way ahead of its time, and while it changed hands, and staffing, since then, the quality of their engine and team was always a high standard. Seeing it gutted to claw back money to spend elsewhere makes me feel that AI is taking away from, rather than adding, to the awesomeness that was hacking crazy irreverent new games and software. If AI is so powerful an amplifier, then why can't some of the most creative and hard working content creating teams be empowered and amplified by it? It seems that computing revolutions in the past were additive, PC, internet, mobile, cloud, but now AI is one of the most destructive I have ever seen.

    • Re: (Score:1, Troll)

      by TurboStar ( 712836 )

      Lots of folks are "empowered and amplified" but most don't go around debating with the shitbirds shitposting about how AI=bad. They are too busy working hard and creating. The finance side of AI is unquestionably bad, but the tech works and doesn't have any of the downsides the now unemployable constantly lament about.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by T34L ( 10503334 )

        I am "empowered and amplified", I use LLM's for coding pretty much every day, and I very much post about how "AI = Bad" because the net effect of AI I can see on the society, statistically and culturally, is a fairly negative.

        Imagine bulldozers as a tool you can use became a thing overnight, with little precedent of what they can do. I happen to have qualified into operating a bulldozer early, because I happened to work on the immediate predecessors of bulldozers and experimented with bulldozer prototypes f

        • People have been saying the same things for many millennia about every new technology. History disagrees with your predictions.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by T34L ( 10503334 )

            People have been often fucking right. History agrees with me.

            • In which instances? What new and disruptive technology turned out just to be harmful?
              • Literally all of them. Technology is always a double-edged sword. If you want a specific example: the exploitation of fossil fuels. Does amazing things! Pollutes the ocean! Pollutes the air! Pollutes groundwater! Helps despots! Mutates the climate! (Even if you claim not to believe the last one, you can't argue the rest.)

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by kwerle ( 39371 )

          I just have to chime in here. My drop-out paper - back around '91 - was titled "Shovels & Society". It was the final for my Computers and Society class - which I did not think much of. The TA was great, though.

          After a few weeks in the class, the TA asked our group how many of us were in this because we enjoy programming. I raised my hand. I was it. I decided I was no longer in the right place.

          Anyway, my brief argument was that computer/software advances were a lot like those of the shovel -> bu

        • Bulldozer flatten the physical world. AI generates content and code in the virtual world. Huge difference.

          So being smart isn't a rarity anymore? Boo hoo.

          When a smartphone can do a diagnosis just as good as a doctor (or better), when it can cough up a legal document that is 80% finished after 30 seconds, that's overall a good thing. Some desk jockeys like us will lose their prestigious jobs. Really no big loss for society as a hole.

          The problem is, of course, that running a fascist surveillance state has just

          • Pretty sure data centers producing 99% porn (etc) AI slop bullshit for dummies affect the real world. Glad you're able to be productive with it, though.

    • Yes and no. Seeing the team gutted hurts a lot, but it is not AI nor is it the result of any kind of specific watershed moment.

      Microsoft has woefully fucked up its gaming division basically from the start of the massive spending spree back 8 years ago where it acquired anyone and everyone they could get their hands on. They did so without any plan, without any intent for developing IP, and as a result most of the layoffs now have zero to do with AI and everything to do with spectacular mismanagement of the

    • People used to license the Tech engine. They don't anymore, the market went with Unreal and Unity. According to someone else here, that's the division that lost people. I can't imagine that it will be helpful for Doom and Wolfenstein development though.

    • Doom was amazing tech, way ahead of its time,

      I think Wolfenstein 3D was really the groundbreaking tech. It introduced the entire 2.5D fast-paced shooter FPS. Doom was just a big refinement and flushing-out of those concepts that Wolf 3D introduced and proved.

      Really, from a technological standpoint, I argue that Quake was the biggest leap, most ambitious and largest technological breakthroughs id software (IE John Carmack) achieved. It is a full 3D game engine, with advanced internal scripting and tons of other capabilities, that is a quantum leap abov

      • You're being disingenuous. Back then every engine was truly revolutionary from a technical standpoint. Wolfenstein engine may have introduced 2.5D, but Doom introduced the entire concept of a Z axis. It was a fundamentally different engine with a fundamentally different process for generating the world and absolutely revolutionary in its day. It wasn't a refinement, it virtually a completely re-think of how to process graphics, and would power many games until Quake revolutionised id Tech into a true 3D spa

    • ...now AI is one of the most destructive

      The profit motive is making it non-economical to do anything other than create mediocre code with LLMs. Exceptional generation defining leaps in tech (like DOOM and Quake) simply won't happen if everyone is just generating their way to the next paycheck.

      Think about it, could AI have come up with Fast inverse square root [wikipedia.org]... I'm sure it could have with enough prompting and someone who knew what they were looking for, feeding it prompts detailed enough that they containe

  • Great tech, brain dead IP. Programmer art.

    And I love watching my son play speed runs on mad level, I never had synapses tike that.

    Doom 2, ultra-hard, co op, was super fun when I was supposed to be working.

    • And I love watching my son play speed runs on mad level, I never had synapses tike that.

      Are you sure? Because maybe they were just trained for a different job. Mine were wasted on Ninja Gaiden, the original I mean. You had to be halfway to a speedrunner just to finish that fucker. But having trained my brain to do that for 2d platformers (which I can't or perhaps don't want to do any more either, but now I'm old and have an excuse) I find it difficult to do it for 3d ones.

  • I was either unaware that id had been purchased by the evil empire, or else I blacked the memory out as a defense mechanism.

    • I was either unaware that id had been purchased by the evil empire, or else I blacked the memory out as a defense mechanism.

      Probably because they weren't directly. The industry is like the car industry, hundreds of brands, thousands of models all owned by a couple of companies on the top.

      Microsoft purchased Zenimax, Zenimax owned id software. We covered this at length but at the time there was no major Doom release scheduled so most of the news focused on the fact that Microsoft was buying Bethesda in the Zenimax deal and id software just got relegated to a footnote.

  • October 13, 2023
    I would have expected the layoffs closer to two years than three, but Microsoft probably had a huge accounting mess to sort from the merger. And the DDR price hikes needed to be massaged until it could be a strong enough excuse to appease the unions.
    The layoffs were planned as part of the buyout. They always aee.

    • id is not Activision. It's Zenimax. The purchase was made before 2023 in 2021. But while I agree with you in principle, that damage was done years ago already with people being fired shortly after the layoffs. This recent round of layoffs are unplanned, and far more related to the fact that Microsoft's xbox division has been performing disastrously over the past 5 years under truly woeful leadership.

  • Supposedly the people that got axed were on the idTech team.

    • I was hoping someone might know what they had been doing.

      If they're going to focus on Doom and Wolfenstein, won't they need the engine? I wonder if it's because nobody seems to want to license the newer versions of it. I see loads of games that use old versions of the Tech engine (why are Doom clones popular again?), but nobody outside of Zenimax seems to use the new versions. I guess Unreal won that contest.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by wed128 ( 722152 )

        why are Doom clones popular again?

        Because they're fun and simple. Sometimes i want to turn my brain off and play a game, and not be immersed in a hyper-realistic world.

      • If they're going to focus on Doom and Wolfenstein, won't they need the engine? I wonder if it's because nobody seems to want to license the newer versions of it.

        Carmack infamously hated the concept of licensing engines and was really happen when id got out of the business back 15 years ago. In their opinion it not only places a burden on the company (needing to track licenses, but also provide support, and tools to 3rd parties) but also places restrictions on the team (when you sell your tech to someone else you can't just introduce breaking changes on a whim to suit your own games anymore.

        As for needing an engine, back in the day id Tech was revolutionary. It real

  • Yep, me too. What they cannot enshittify, they simply destroy.

    • Well no one, by all accounts they ran some of the most amazing and successful game studios themselves, e.g. Bungie.

      However MS buying ALL THE STUDIOS without any plan of what to do with them... that was always going to end in disaster.

  • You know, hire an outside party to come in and take a close look at what each individual employee is contributing, tenure, red staplers, and then hear out each individual's commentary on how many bosses get to visit him regarding the cover page of something called TPS Reports

    Also a summary of one's typical day at the office would apply, etc

  • Its not that half of were lost or are leaving, id software fired them... yes? no?

  • Knee deep... (Score:3)

    by Chris Mattern ( 191822 ) on Wednesday July 08, 2026 @09:30AM (#66228112)

    ..in the fired.

  • In a fit of rage, John Carmack was seen launching an armadillo into orbit.
  • Man this is just sad, id is forever tied in my mind to getting into PC hobby stuff and needing a discrete GPU. Doom Dark Ages was even super fun, killing off idTech feels like a cultural loss.

  • update (Score:3)

    by Simon Garlick ( 104721 ) on Wednesday July 08, 2026 @08:18PM (#66229128)

    75%

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