id Software loses 136 staff, and a former dev says the Doom studio is now support-team sized

The numbers on id Software’s layoffs are now official, and they are worse than the early reports suggested. A WARN notice filed in Texas this week confirms 136 job losses at the Doom and Quake studio: 96 at its Richardson, Texas headquarters and a further 40 remote roles tied to the studio. Set against the 185 employees id reportedly had as of a union announcement last December, that works out to roughly three-quarters of the studio gone in a single round of cuts.

The layoffs are part of the wider Xbox cuts that also hit ZeniMax Online, announced this week by Xbox boss Asha Sharma in an email to staff. But it is the testimony from inside id that gives the clearest picture of what has actually been lost.

‘Relegated to support studio size’

Derek Best, a former VFX artist who worked on all three modern Doom games, said in a lengthy LinkedIn post that he was ‘in shock at how brutal the layoff cuts’ were, claiming ‘collectively decades of knowledge was wiped out of the studio’. According to Best, the VFX team was reduced to a single artist with no lead or producer, and the engine programmer responsible for major VFX pipeline and particle editor improvements was also let go.

His bleakest assessment is about what id now is. ‘Writing on the wall is getting relegated to support studio size and moving to Unreal,’ he wrote, basing the claim on internal email and the specific roles cut. ‘Engine team was decimated. Supremely short sighted and brain-dead moves from Asha et all.’

That last point deserves emphasis. id Software’s identity has always been inseparable from its technology; idTech has powered every Doom and Quake and has long been a benchmark for raw performance. A studio that no longer maintains its own engine is a fundamentally different studio, and reporting on the scale of the cuts suggests id may be functionally unable to lead development of a new game on its own, at least in the near term. To be clear, neither Microsoft nor Xbox has confirmed any engine change; the Unreal claim remains informed speculation from affected staff rather than an announcement.

What the cuts mean for Doom: The Dark Ages

The specialist losses are just as concerning as the headline number. Best says every developer with Houdini expertise for procedural modelling and cached animations was laid off, meaning existing Houdini-based work on Doom: The Dark Ages has ‘gone to waste with no one to carry it on’. That has obvious implications for how the game is supported and extended from here.

The timing has also drawn fire. VFX artist Todd Boyce criticised the layoffs landing the day before a major Dark Ages expansion shipped, one he says developers crunched on with unpaid overtime to finish. ‘This is what insanity and despicable corporate greed looks like,’ Boyce wrote, calling it insulting to the people who built ‘an engine that has consistently been the industry standard for performance’.

The open question in Frankfurt

id Software also operates a studio in Frankfurt, Germany, focused specifically on the idTech engine. Its status after this week’s cuts is not yet clear, and it may end up being the most telling detail of all. If Frankfurt survives intact, idTech has a future in some form; if it doesn’t, the Unreal speculation starts looking a lot less like speculation. Given how widespread layoffs have become across the industry this year, few will be assuming the best.