Doom Developer id Software Is Reportedly Losing Half Its Staff (engadget.com)
- Reference: 0184347214
- News link: https://games.slashdot.org/story/26/07/07/1938210/doom-developer-id-software-is-reportedly-losing-half-its-staff
- Source link: https://www.engadget.com/2209928/doom-developer-id-software-is-reportedly-losing-half-its-staff/
> 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 [4]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 [5]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.
[1] https://www.engadget.com/2209928/doom-developer-id-software-is-reportedly-losing-half-its-staff/
[2] https://games.slashdot.org/story/26/07/06/1827209/microsoft-lays-off-nearly-5000-employees-across-xbox-commercial-sales
[3] https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/report-around-half-of-the-id-software-team-have-been-laid-off
[4] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/michael-maynard-9371591_big-day-today-at-id-software-we-produced-activity-7480085627364114432-jGwE
[5] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-06/microsoft-s-xbox-to-cut-3-200-jobs-divest-five-studios-in-major-overhaul
On the plus side (Score:4, Insightful)
This will free up more resources so they can completely destroy the rest of their businesses.
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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!"
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Woooo AI games here we come
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> 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?
A watershed moment (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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
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People have been saying the same things for many millennia about every new technology. History disagrees with your predictions.
Congrats for keeping it going this long (Score:2)
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.
Boy, I am really out of touch (Score:2)
I was either unaware that id had been purchased by the evil empire, or else I blacked the memory out as a defense mechanism.
Losing them? (Score:2)
They know where they are. Their addresses are all on file.
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It's "Learn to prmpt" these days, dude.
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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
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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.
Fired, just use the word (Score:2)
Softening the language does not change the employees from being fired.
Oh wait, the news source also accepts advertising from games companies.....