In a grim week for the games industry where Microsoft laid off 1,600 people (with 1,600 further job cuts hanging over the heads of Xbox employees) one decision stood out as especially egregious. Id Software, developer of Doom and Quake, was forced to lay off 136 people – more than half of its workforce.
These brutal cuts were accompanied by a slew of reports that painted an extremely gloomy picture. There were fears that its brilliant id-tech engine might be put out to pasture. That the next Doom game might be made in Unreal engine. That id Software is now the size of a support studio – perfect for being absorbed into the amorphous development blob that is Call of Duty.
Over the past week or so, however, conflicting information has emerged. Id Software issued a blanket statement saying that “while our studio was impacted” the company still has “the crew we need to build the games and tech we’re known for”. Meanwhile, fears of id becoming a support studio were countered by Tom Warren of the Verge, who reported that the team is “now in the early stages of a new Doom game”. Id’s Game Director Hugo Martin, meanwhile, has explicitly stated that id has not been “gutted”, explaining: “We’re the size we were when we made Doom 2016, and id Tech is very much alive and well.” And Xbox’s refocussing its core franchises reportedly includes Doom and Quake, alongside all the recently announced Fallout games.
Politely, what the hell is going on? Why would Microsoft so drastically and dramatically cut one of the most revered developers in the industry as it doubles down on the games that same studio makes? How can id Software possibly have the crew it needs to continue making the games it is known for with more than half its workforce gone? Do id Software and Hugo Martin’s statements reflect the reality on the ground, or is this a gun-to-the-head situation as Xbox desperately tries to mitigate the reputational quad-damage its horrendous cuts have inevitably caused?
It’s hard to say for certain, because Xbox has engineered a situation where it is hard to trust anything it says. From Asha Sharma proclaiming Xbox would “lean into” its “iconic teams” to cutting 20 percent of its workforce within six months, to Xbox announcing a new Senua game and then severing ties with the studio within a week, Xbox has developed a habit of saying one thing and doing another.
Despite this, here is our best attempt to reconcile Xbox’s behaviour with the statement made by id. The logic required is short-sighted and deeply cynical, but it is logic nonetheless, and it boils down to the reality of how modern triple-A games are made.
Modern triple-A games take four to five years (or longer) to develop, and the teams that make them are large – usually in the hundreds. But these teams do not necessarily need to be that large for the duration of the project. Game development goes through multiple phases, like preproduction, active development, post-release support, etc. Of these, the production phase is typically the most intensive and where the most hands are needed on deck.
But depending on the needs of the project, the pre and post-production phases might be manageable with fewer employees. Making a game might require a total of 300 people, but doing all the initial concepting and design work – which itself might take one or two years – may require far fewer.
This is partly why the games industry seems trapped in an endless cycle of layoffs, and why some developers lose their jobs even when their games sell well. If a programmer costs, say, $150,000 a year to hire, then why hire them for five years if you only need them for three?
To be wholly clear, I’m not suggesting that this is an optimal or appropriate way to run a games studio. There are alternatives to laying off developers that are temporarily surplus to requirement. Assigning them to smaller projects like an expansion or, a skunkworks team on the side, or scheduling projects so that one is ramping up in the background as your current game nears completion. And all of this assumes that the developers being laid off are actually not needed at that moment, which may not be the case. Businesses of all stripes try to make their employees do more with less all the time.
Nonetheless, this is the best explanation I can muster for what’s currently happening at id. Id has just released its Revelations expansion for Doom: The Dark Ages, representing the conclusion of that project. As mentioned, The Verge’s Tom Warren claims that id is now commencing work on the next Doom game with its reduced team. As such, while Hugo Martin et all figure out the shape of that game over the next one or two years, Xbox is paying 136 fewer people for the privilege.
None of this makes Xbox’s strategy right, or an example of good management. Neither is it necessarily the only factor at play. Reports state that of the 158 Xbox workers being laid off in Texas (which includes id Software devs and employees from ZeniMax Media more broadly) 146 are union members, indicating that this was as much a union-busting exercise as it was a cost-cutting one.
Likewise, even if this decision was motivated purely by how good the resulting numbers look in a spreadsheet, there are a whole bunch of hidden costs to such severe layoffs. Team morale is one. Put it this way, would you want to work for a company where half of your colleagues disappear overnight – some of whom have been there for years – fresh off the back of launching an expansion which everyone agrees is superb?
There’s also another cost, less immediately obvious but just as important, and that’s institutional experience. For starters, there’s id-tech, the studio’s proprietary engine whose team has reportedly been a major focus for the cuts. Not only is id-tech a visual powerhouse, but it’s also one of the best-optimised engines out there – an immensely valuable ace to have up your sleeve in an era of stratospheric hardware prices. However brave a face id may put on things, laying off so many of the people responsible for creating and curating that technology seems like downright self-sabotage on Xbox’s part.
More broadly, nobody else is doing what id Software is doing right now, and arguably nobody else could do it. In the last decade, id Software has reinvented Doom – and single-player first-person shooting – from base principles three times (arguably four, if we include the Dark Ages DLC). Modern id does with Doom what Nintendo does with 3D Mario, taking its most fundamental essence and asking ‘How can we make this new?‘ with each game it makes.
Interestingly, one other thing id and Nintendo hitherto had in common was stability. Many of Nintendo’s designers have been there for their entire careers. Likewise, many id Software employees have been there for decades. So many of the credits that appear in Doom 2016 also crop up in Eternal and The Dark Ages. One id Software staffer made redundant in these layoffs, known only as “employee number 13” had been at the studio since the days of Romero and Carmack.
The case of id, then, is really one that seems emblematic of the development industry at large: this stability, and the experience and mutual understanding that derives from it, is what enables these studios to make the games they do. Now, Microsoft has blown that stability out of the water. Who knows where the shrapnel will land?
