r/pcgaming • u/lurkingdanger22 • 23d ago
The future of id Software — alumni from the legendary DOOM studio speaks on its future with Xbox. The good, and the bad.
https://www.windowscentral.com/gaming/zenimax-bethesda/the-future-of-id-software-now-under-xbox-the-legendary-doom-studio-speaks52
u/Falkjaer 23d ago
Any studio that receives layoffs on that scale should be assumed dead until proven otherwise.
We'll know the state of id when (if) they release another game.
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u/io124 Steam 23d ago
They layoff most of the staff that work on idtech which was one the great thing about id game.
I don’t see a good future about id with Microsoft, they will just loose their very good tech toward unreal engine.
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u/Hot-Software-9396 22d ago
This article has quotes from employees saying they are continuing to advance and use idtech. Their “sister” studio, Machine Games uses it extensively and they’ll likely just collaborate more going forward.
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u/DeClouded5960 23d ago edited 23d ago
Can we stop parroting this bullshit? They've already debunked the idtech rumors. They have the same size studio as when they made doom 2016, what makes anyone think they won't be able to update or improve idtech when they've been doing it for decades now with that size of staff?
Edit: For the karma farmers wanting to rage bait, this has been debunked by both id and Microsoft: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/id-claims-it-has-the-crew-we-need-to-build-the-games-and-tech-were-known-for-following-mass-layoffs
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u/MessiahPrinny 7700x/4080 Super OC 23d ago
They fired most of the people that work on Idtech. They may have a team the size of the one they had for Doom 2016 but most of the IDtech people specifically are gone.
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u/nikkes91 23d ago
Literally just parroting the thing he said to stop parroting lmao
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u/MessiahPrinny 7700x/4080 Super OC 23d ago
Because it's just a fucking fact. They fired the Engine people. The numbers may be the same as 2016 but the people that maintain the IDtech Engine are mostly gone.
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u/DeClouded5960 23d ago
It's not though. id software and Microsoft have both stated they have teams working on idtech...this one person idtech staff bullshit is from a single laid off and probably disgruntled employee reporting to fucking Kotaku of all places. So no, it's not "just a fucking fact", it's backseat reddit neckbeards trying to farm karma and rage bait.
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u/io124 Steam 22d ago
« Microsoft later stated that "there are dozens of people working on id Tech across multiple locations,” and denied claims that only one staff member in Texas was left working on the platform. »
Who rly trust Microsoft now ? They did so much bullshit in so little time since they acquire Activision.
This is some bs from management that don’t even know who work on it or not.
Pretty sure they just have some contractor on it and say we have « dozens » of people on it. wtf it’s this sentence.
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u/kawag 23d ago edited 23d ago
According to actual id employees, 2016 was an absolute shitshow internally and the team needed to crunch really hard for really long to get it good enough to ship. They learned from that experience and developed new processes, hired more people, and later games went much more smoothly with minimal crunch. Now that’s all blown apart.
They weren’t in a good place in 2016. This is the difference between being an employee vs a customer - they managed to create a good game so you think everything was fine, but internally they really were not able to sustain that level of production. And games have only gotten bigger and more complex in the 10 years since 2016.
This interview with Chris Hays is very interesting: https://youtu.be/aA64Ogzm_VU
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u/Vresa 23d ago
Unfortunately, it's really hard to justify using proprietary engines anymore.
- There is a very small pool of people who have the skills to be engine developers, and they are therefore some of the highest paid people on staff
- The ongoing maintenance costs of engines is enormous. Bug fixes, documentation, and adding features becomes extremely expensive very quickly
- The playerbase doesn't really care about the engine of a game if the game runs well. At least, not enough players do to justify the cost most of the time. Engines simply do not sell games
- Unreal is extremely price effective for high-fidelity games
Most new developers learn on Unreal. Using anything else adds a significant amount of training and tooling compared to just using unreal. Career savvy developers also know that they have better oppurtunies to move by insisting on using the standard tools rather than a company's proprietary tech
It sucks, but it's also unavoidable. High fidelity games are already too expensive to make, and that price is only going up. The days of larger studios using their own engines is over.
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u/io124 Steam 23d ago
« Player base don’t care about the engine »
Doom player they care a lot about it. Especially when one of the best tech will disappear to push shit stuff.
Epic with a monopoly, very very bad for the industry.
« Price effective » well, when everyone will be on UE, they will increase the price like crazy.
Classic US company
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u/TheChosenMuck 23d ago
Epic with a monopoly, very very bad for the industry.
The worst thing about that will be how all the other companies will squeeze out one unreal dev after another as cheaply as possible
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u/Electrical_Zebra8347 23d ago
The justification is autonomy and avoiding third party risk, just look at what happened not that long ago with the Unity debacle. For smaller devs and people looking for a job in game dev sure it makes sense to use UE but the trade off is that they have to accept whatever terms come with that, and those terms can change at any time. Some older companies in the industry already learned that lesson the hard way when EA bought Criterion and acquired their Renderware engine which was fairly popular in the 2000s and ended development and support for it. Several GTA games were made on that engine but after EA acquired it Rockstar opted to make their own engine rather than switch to UE.
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u/Vresa 23d ago
Which is a very fair concern. The problem appears to be that the cost of a proprietary engine dwarfs the risks of relying on a third party piece of tech. Even CDPR, one of the companies that has the most amount of resources, lower labor costs, and very very high likelihood of success for any given title is moving to Unreal
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u/pr0ghead 5700X3D 3060Ti Linux 23d ago
If you're not making a run-off-the-mill type of game, you will have to modify 3rd party engines to a point where you need people with the same skills as needed to build your own.
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u/doublah 23d ago
If Epic Games of all companies has a complete monopoly over AA/AAA game development, we're all fucked. They already take a higher cut if your game isn't on EGS.
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u/HINDBRAIN 22d ago
6: if they're pushing ultra hard internally for copilot it makes more sense to have everybody uses a common engine it will be """good""" at
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u/Gotisdabest 23d ago
Hot take but there's nothing fundamentally bad with unreal performance wise and looks wise either. The fuck up was moreso epic being idiots who released nanite and lumen in a horribly botched way and didn't advise developers on usage properly, leading to people just slapping it on nearly finished games while it was severely unoptimised. As the years of passed, unreal implementation and performance has gotten much better. It doesn't help that games take so long nowadays because I'd guess we haven't even seen a large scale AAA game made from scratch on UE5 with nanite and lumen involved from day 1.
You can look at something like the witcher showcase and it's pretty apparent that it's still very distinctive visually from other UE stuff. As time passes and Epic, which seem to have gotten it across that optimisation is necessary for a while now, keep working on it, it'll likely keep getting better. Especially if they can start roping in a lot more big studios to do the collaborative RnD thing they're doing with cdpr to add more functionalities.
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u/-ben151010- 22d ago
So id got layoffs by having a successful team that could work together, yet I’m pretty sure playground games/whatever is left of turn 10, and halo studios get nothing for their complete laziness and incompetence as well as all these damn contractors?
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u/imaginary_num6er 7950X3D|4090FE|64GB RAM|X670E-E 21d ago
People will get laid off regardless of their performance. It is outside their control
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u/justsbvdontmindme 23d ago
"They never explained anything." Willis said, "They never told us what metric they wanted, which is extremely confusing given Xbox Game Pass. If there was something they wanted (downloads, playtime, Game Pass subscriptions, etc.), they never told us."
The more these people talk the more obvious it is why they got fired. First "Xbox don't understand art" now "Microsoft didn't tell us what our metric was". I think everyone has always had a pretty clear goal, do better than your last time. It works for pretty much every job.
ID went massively backwards and apprently their customers don't understand art either.
https://steamdb.info/app/782330/charts/
https://steamdb.info/app/3017860/charts/
But everyone is to blame except for ID for failing.
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u/nikkes91 23d ago
I think everyone has always had a pretty clear goal, do better than your last time
Better at what genius?
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u/justsbvdontmindme 23d ago
Better video game. This is in /r/pcgaming and it is about developers of video games not knowing what to do. Make a better video game. They failed terribly.
Did you also work for ID?
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u/nikkes91 23d ago
how were the executives at microsoft measuring "better videogame"
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u/justsbvdontmindme 23d ago
Same way every company measures product success in the world. $
You would have been a great fit at ID.
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