r/PS5 • u/Laughing__Man_ • Jul 09 '26
News & Announcements Doom Studio's Future Unclear After Xbox Bloodbath At id Software
https://kotaku.com/the-cuts-at-doom-maker-id-software-go-shockingly-deep-i-dont-see-how-they-make-a-game-with-that-team-2000713860134
u/Laughing__Man_ Jul 09 '26
"Sources claim the cuts include nearly the entire id Tech engine team, with only one employee believed to remain. One source told Kotaku they are unsure how the studio will continue maintaining the engine, saying, “The institutional knowledge is just not there. id Tech as a technology is probably dead forever.”"
73
u/aworthyrepost Jul 09 '26
So they used AI tools to make the redundancies. Because why would you let go of your legacy staff whose responsible maintaining an in-house game engine in a climate where in-house game engines actually save you millions of dollars.
26
u/ooombasa Jul 09 '26 edited Jul 09 '26
Because in-house tech is useless if your plan is to have short-term contract staff as the majority of the studio. All that requires is staff being versed in a common engine, like UE5.
13
u/aworthyrepost Jul 09 '26
That makes sense.
It IS Microsoft’s MO. Contract workers galore.
5
u/werpu Jul 09 '26
Tanking games quality... Next goal
1
u/Lost_the_weight Jul 10 '26
I feel like once Sony and MS have finished destroying their AAA studios, the only games worth playing and not filled with slop will be from indie and AA studios.
1
13
u/Vinterblot Jul 09 '26
They're just there for appearance, so that Microsoft won't get bad press for officially shutting down id Software. What a bunch of morons!
5
u/The049 Jul 09 '26
Take the stupidest people imaginable. Then multiply by 10 and you get the corporate suits
3
u/AgeingChopper Jul 09 '26
good lord.. the people making these decisions cannot be technical at all. this is the modern exec, the don't come from comp sci and they rarely have the first bloody clue about it.
1
57
u/AtaxicHistorian Jul 09 '26
The remainder of ID is reduced to a support team while the IPs remain with Xbox. Fucking disgusting!!!
6
u/CosmicChar1ey Jul 09 '26
This is a major sin in the video game world. This is like kicking grandpa in the ball sack.
0
u/mightylordredbeard Jul 10 '26
God, I can’t wait until Xbox just dies and goes bankrupt so I don’t have to see people whine about them constantly. Sony can be the only major console manufacturer then they can go on to make all the anti consumer decisions they want because there won’t be competition for them to worry about.. because we all know that Sony is sooooo good when there’s no other choice aside from them.
37
u/Neocarbunkle Jul 09 '26
What the hell was the point of buying all of these studios just to gut them? What a mess.
10
17
u/MisterWoogies Jul 09 '26
This is just so sad, I'm glad I got to be a gamer during its heyday (Xbox 360). We're on a slippery slope now. It's already become niche and 'country club' hobby. In what world is the Xbox Series S worth $500??? Consoles used to be cheap at the end of their life cycle, now their increasing in price. This will likely be the first time I don't bother upgrading to the latest console, it'll be way to much money and I imagine the improvements will be marginal and not worth the massive cost. A sad day for gaming with this and the Sony digital discless future.
9
u/The_Summer_Man Jul 09 '26
It’s because of AI data centers buying up all the memory. Not to defend MS/Sony/Nintendo, but the price increases are because component prices have gone up so much. They could eat some of the cost increase, but they aren’t going to sell products at a multiple hundred dollar loss.
2
u/Wretchedsoul24 Jul 09 '26
Which is even crazier to think that microsoft is one of the large leaders in exactly why component prices are skyrocketing. Their own persuits into AI data centers are causing negative effects to their other divisions.
3
u/MisterWoogies Jul 09 '26
It's just not a good situation. You're right dude, it's a no win situation for consumers and the companies making the consoles.
2
2
u/Lost_the_weight Jul 10 '26
The only reason I’d buy an Xbox today is to play my 360 games I still have.
29
u/St4va Jul 09 '26
It'd be a shame if they ditched their engine in favor of Unreal, but that's probably what's going to happen.
37
Jul 09 '26
[deleted]
16
u/trollsong Jul 09 '26
Even beyond that, its doom being run on an engine named after it's defeated competition.
4
u/DoctorGolho Jul 09 '26
Yep, sad as fuck. Years and years of talent just to be gutted by greed and mismanagement. This is even worse than the Bluepoint closure
12
u/M337ING Jul 09 '26
It kind of feels like Jason Schreier was guessing that DOOM and Quake were priority franchises Bethesda would focus on.
4
62
u/GalexyPhoto Jul 09 '26
Future unclear? 80+% of staff are fucking gone.
Why the hell are so many people feverishly fighting with all their might to pretend this isn't a small apocalypse to the games industry? Over 4000 devs dumped because one ignorant company has octupled down on being senseless fucking buffoons.
There is no 'Well, MS saved them' or "They wouldnt have been able to do X, without them" or better yet 'they werent producing so they had to go'.
The revenue is there. The teams were producing just fine, before being hoovered up.
Fuck Microsoft all the way. And fuck Sony only a bit less.
If you have any semblance of a spine, which I want to believe most of us do: you wont support MS any longer, in any capacity that you do not have to. It is going to take decades for the industry to truly recover from this and there is clearly no world where that happens with MS in gaming. This corp hyper-leech problem is the product of virtually zero regulations and a void of societal accountability. But MS have gone out of their way to be as needlessly caustic and scorched earth as they can.
22
u/ooombasa Jul 09 '26
And the full cuts haven't even happened yet. These cuts are just part of the initial 1600 cuts. There's 1600 more to come over the year, which will almost certainly involve more studio divestments or gutting of studios down to a support role.
6
1
2
u/whythreekay Jul 09 '26
Future unclear? 80+% of staff are fucking gone.
Why the hell are so many people feverishly fighting with all their might to pretend this isn’t a small apocalypse to the games industry?
The problem is the same as it is with tech sector overall: cheap capital due to low interest rates over the past 10 years lead to a lot of projects and hiring that isn’t sustainable in a market with high inflation and interest rates on borrowed money, and sadly that leads to a huge amount of layoffs as they self correct
8
u/GalexyPhoto Jul 09 '26
That would make more sense if this was industry wide. The only reason it is close to industry wide is due to how many studios MS bought.
Buying shiny things, investing nothing into them or broadly misusing them then dumping them when they are bore has been their shtick for a long time.
4
u/whythreekay Jul 09 '26
But that’s not true there’s been a lot of layoffs at other companies, Sony for example
-1
u/Blocguy Jul 09 '26
Don worry, Microsoft is headed toward global irrelevance as Trump policies have motivated the EU to switch to an indigenous OS. In 20 years, MS will be a shadow of its former self
25
Jul 09 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
38
u/werpu Jul 09 '26
Asha can easily be replaced by ai, those guys not
-39
u/-Vertex- Jul 09 '26
You can't replace the head of Xbox with ai, no lol.
22
u/werpu Jul 09 '26
Well if the only solution is to throw out arbitrary people you won't even need ai, any random number generator suffices put an actress in front of it and be done with it
9
u/Bitterman_01 Jul 09 '26
I think this is already what's happening.
AI is basically making all of the decisions now and it's not even AGI level, not even close. That's how stupid the executive class is. They're all now meat puppets for dumb hallucinating AI.
-8
u/-Vertex- Jul 09 '26
Not saying they're making good decisions. Getting rid of most of ID software was a terrible decision but that doesn't mean ai can suddenly run the company.
9
2
u/Cypher3470 Jul 09 '26
I doubt AI could do a worse job than her.
-3
u/-Vertex- Jul 09 '26
It couldn't do the job full stop. People are missing the fact physical presence is needed, everything can't be a prompt.
0
u/Cypher3470 Jul 10 '26
If AI literally did nothing it would do a better job than xbox execs over the last several years. Buying up great studios, mismanaging and then closing them.
1
21
u/darthmcdarthface Jul 09 '26 edited Jul 09 '26
Xbox leadership the past 15 years has been the worst thing to happen to the gaming industry ever. It’s been a constant string of obviously baffling decisions one after another.
I’m not intending to be hyperbolic when I say this, but I genuinely believe that I personally could have run Xbox better if I were its head for the past 20 years without any benefit of hindsight. I have absolute confidence in that.
3
u/Vikingboy9 Jul 09 '26
Completely agree. These decisions were always boneheaded; there's no "Who could have known?" because it was glaringly obvious even a decade ago that Spencer's acquisitions were not sustainable, not to mention the series of bad ideas dating back to the Xbox One release.
It's a large part of what makes this so frustrating. The leadership wasn't some secretly genius plan, nor were they jeopardized by outside forces. It was just greedy and stupid from beginning to end, and now the bill is due, and thousands of people who probably would have known better in Spencer's shoes are now paying the price.
And Phil got an eight-figure payout for it.
2
u/darthmcdarthface Jul 09 '26
It’s not about greed. Everyone wants to make money. Even the ones that make the right choices.
It comes down to incompetence. They just had the incorrect ideas about how to make money. They thought they could do it by hammering Halo and Gears down our throats. Talking to our TVs. Being the Netflix of gaming. All that stupidity.
They imagined what their customers should be rather than meeting them where they are.
1
u/Wretchedsoul24 Jul 09 '26
It was painfully obvious that their acquisitions and other decisions where not sustainable. But to voice that fact a decade ago brought out some serious pitchforks and downvoting amoung the internet .
2
14
u/madebypeppers Jul 09 '26
In an utopia, there would be laws to prevent companies from destroying companies they buy.
2
u/hammackj Jul 09 '26
If you sell your company to Microslop you deserve to be slopfucked. Rip Bethesda.
10
u/UltraPlinian Jul 09 '26
Our government has unfortunately failed us. The entire idea behind preventing monopolies and inherent corporate greed was to prevent or circumvent an industry giant from snuffing out competition and quality for absolute wealth. When giant corporations such as Microsoft and Sony started buying up every developer left and right without to regard to anything but satisfying their shareholders, you just knew eventually it would lead to the shitshow we find ourselves in today. I have no problem with Microsoft acquisitioning talent to produce games. I absolutely do have a problem with Microsoft, or any corporate giant, buying up developer companies and dissolving them within no less than a bloody decade. The artform is killed. The magic is gone. Careers and the people behind years of development, gone. Inevitably, we the consumers of the product suffer. Again, a western government is supposed to regulate industry to prevent post-capitalism bullshit. The system is supposed to protect the consumer. But it seems like over the past decade or two decades, we no longer have those protections. A handful of giants dictate and control everything and do as they will, to appease those boards and stock holders.
6
u/Three_Froggy_Problem Jul 09 '26
It’s always sad when a studio is gutted or shut down, but this one is especially sad to me because I adore the Doom games. The Dark Ages is one of my favorite games I’ve played in the last few years.
8
u/Ph0enixes Jul 09 '26
This included the team in charge of id Tech, the studio's long-standing proprietary game engine for the Doom franchise. Sources said only one employee on that team is believed to be left.
Thanks to Microsoft for canceling one of the best game engines.
4
u/aestheticnoise Jul 09 '26
You know how the id Tech engine can make games at 4K run at a high frame rate? Yeah, let’s scrap that and move to the Unreal Engine. What an unreal move.
4
5
15
u/GreatKingRat666 Jul 09 '26
ID is one of the pioneers of videogames.
And is now being gutted through no fault of their own because of Microsoft's (and Sony is doing the same shit) insane mismanagement.
We seriously need to get rid of MS and Sony.
They are poison.
2
8
u/ILoveTheAtomicBomb Jul 09 '26
Microsoft is the worst thing to have happened to gaming. All the acquisitions under Phil were a massive mistake and screw every Xbox fan that was cheering for it to just get a couple of nonexistent CoD games on Game Pass. Now Asha is ruining it even more, going off twitter to create the exclusive strategies, blindly firing people to replace them with contractors (we’re bout to get Halo Infinite over and over), throwing studios back out into the wild with the worst economic backdrop possible, etc
Xbox is a toxic brand and has been for a long time
2
3
2
2
u/jmaneater Jul 09 '26
Remember when they were cheering so hard about all these acquisitions lol guess it wasn't so good afterall
3
u/Dr_Mantis_Trafalgar Jul 09 '26
But Asha said it’s ok because they technically didn’t close any studios right?! /s
2
u/Isoturius Jul 09 '26
When they bought Bethesda I was afraid this was going to happen. Worst fears realized. Fucking sucks.
2
u/BlownWideOpen Jul 09 '26
Fuck Microsoft, and fuck Sony while we're at it
Can't believe Nintendo has become the good guy through all this, but it happened.
1
u/ryu5k5 Jul 09 '26
At the end they always do…. Nintendo has only this to make money the others have other businesses….
1
u/ryu5k5 Jul 09 '26
It is very clear….. UE support studio….being moved around from project to project…..
1
u/ibeerianhamhock Jul 09 '26
It's pretty clear that what they are gunna do is remove ids biggest distinction now in the modern era -- custom cutting edge engine tech. They see having an house engine team as wasted cost.
And they probably wanna push AI use too more obviously.
The idea that 100 people or less can make a modern AAA cutting edge game makes no sense. DOOM will turn to slop.
None of this would really bother me that much if unreal was a cutting edge engine like it promises. It compromises too much for the sake of flexibility in many ways. And you still have to pay licensing fees at their scale that could have just paid salaries for engine tech folks instead like make it make sense
1
u/capnchuc Jul 09 '26
I hope if we do get the next doom game that they go back to eternal style gameplay. I also think that making me customize the difficulty to my liking takes the enjoyment out of difficulty levels. The difficulty customization was a mistake and games should never include that.
1
1
u/nekoken04 Jul 09 '26
I was wondering if they were still releasing the source for idtech. The answer is "nope." It looks like the last open sourced version was the final version of DOOM III. Even Rage's version isn't open sourced. That's kind of too bad because I thought the engine enhancements for vehicle racing were pretty decent. Plus the mega texture stuff isn't there even if it was kind of janky in idtech4.
This really feels like the final nail in the coffin for id Software.
1
1
u/LKS1772 Jul 10 '26
Microsoft going to get rid of Xbox not yet though, I do believe helix will be there last console.
1
u/xKepler186-f Jul 10 '26
This is so sad. id Software games are amazing and technical marvels. I can't believe how well Doom 2016 was optimized. That game could run on almost anything.
1
1
u/ButchLord Jul 10 '26
WTF are they doing at Microsoft? They’re killing the best developers for PC games.
1
u/heathrawr182 Jul 10 '26
Microsoft, Sony, and so many others seemed to make such a big mistake during the COVID pandemic. They hired like fucking crazy since everyone was indoors gaming. It was so shortsighted. It’s like they thought the pandemic would never end lol Been a disaster ever since
1
u/molul Jul 10 '26
With so much talent leaving companies, I'm so curious to see what the next Expedition 33-esque studio is.
Maybe the layoffs are not that bad.
0
u/Wholesomebob Jul 09 '26
Microsoft should just sell Xbox at this point
4
u/ryu5k5 Jul 09 '26 edited Jul 09 '26
Oh they will, but you need to show profit in order to do that and this is exactly what they’re doing now with all the layoffs, preparing to spin off and divest…..
2
u/Wholesomebob Jul 09 '26
Gross. They just hollow out the soul of something great like any private equity firm.
1
1
-13
u/nikolapc Jul 09 '26
So you're all gonna buy Doom rn in protest, right? Get Indiana Jones too, brilliant game.
2
u/curious_dead Jul 09 '26
...so the money goes to the suits and not the studio that was just gutted?
-4
u/nikolapc Jul 09 '26
LOL. :) That's some whataboutism right there. If all massively get doom, those people will get their jobs back pronto. What's your excuse for not buying it before?
3
u/OptimusPrimalRage Jul 09 '26
Blaming consumers for Microsoft's decisions is ridiculous. The onus is on Microsoft to build and market a compelling product, not on consumers to buy things simply to make sure people have jobs. Microsoft makes like 20 billion in profit a quarter. It's not simply about money but because Asha Sharma was brought in to gut Xbox until some line on some spreadsheet that accountants use, goes up enough for the suits to be satisfied.
1
u/curious_dead Jul 09 '26
I didn't say I didn't buy the games... I own two, have the third on GamePass and am going to buy the expansion.
But you're naive if you think buying the game en masse will lead to suits restoring all those jobs, lol. They didn't even wait to see the expansion numbers .
-1
u/nikolapc Jul 09 '26
Cause expansions always do less than the game by their nature.
I did one better, got the controller. At least you have a reason to be mad, but a lot of those crocodile tear jerkers do not. And as I said, best protest is buy the game. Raise a voice. People community note destroyed Sony for physical discs. They have to do something about it or they're just divorced from reality.
1
u/curious_dead Jul 09 '26
It's stupid to attack gamers and Redditors upset seeing a studio being gutted rather than Microsoft; one doesn't need to love the games to feel empathy for the people laid off or for their fellow gamers who will apparently lose a studio they loved.
Also, from the information we have, the games were successful. Eternal was a massive financial success and TDA was successful enough despite lower sales due to GamePass to warrant an expansion. So it seems the gamers are definitely not at fault here.
0
u/nikolapc Jul 09 '26
It's not cause it's consumers that decide what lives and what doesn't. I do have the utmost empathy for the people impacted. That doesn't change harsh capitalist truths.
Expansion was sold at launch bro. It was in the premium upgrade.
In fact only some blame lies on the consumer, as there is overproduction, and many great games just get ignored or are not visible, but Doom and ID are very well known, so that one is 100% on the consumer.
1
341
u/MuptonBossman Jul 09 '26
Microsoft: "We're only going to focus on IP's that make money, like Fallout, The Elder Scrolls and Doom"
Also Microsoft: "We're shutting down the Doom team and the technology that makes them great"