id Software Plays Down Layoffs, Says It Still Has the Team to Build ‘Games and Tech’

id Software has finally spoken up after one of the roughest weeks in its 35-year history, and the tone is defiantly steady. In its first public statement since Xbox’s sweeping layoffs cut around 100 jobs at the Doom and Quake developer, the studio says the changes were ‘spread across teams’ and that it still has ‘the crew we need to build the games and tech we’re known for’.

The most concrete claim in the statement is the size comparison: id says its team today is ‘about the same size’ as when it shipped Doom 2016 — which, for the record, turned out rather well. The studio also reaffirmed its flat structure, where ‘everyone is a maker’, and promised to keep building games and tech ‘moving forward’, signing off with a nod to QuakeCon this August.

The statement versus the reports

That reassurance lands against a considerably bleaker picture painted by people who were actually let go. As a former developer claimed after the cuts, the studio had been ‘nuked into the dirt’ and ‘relegated to support studio size’. Derek Best, a VFX artist who worked on all three modern Doom games, described the layoffs as ‘brutal’ in a lengthy LinkedIn post, saying decades of collective knowledge were wiped out, the VFX team was reduced to a single artist with no lead or producer, and the engine programmer behind major VFX pipeline improvements was also let go.

Co-founder John Carmack weighed in too, admitting his old prediction that ‘Microsoft will probably be a good steward of the brand’ isn’t ageing well, and that the news would dampen the mood at the founder reunion planned for QuakeCon next month. So the studio’s official line and the accounts from departing staff are, to put it mildly, not telling the same story. Both can be partially true: id may well retain enough people to ship games while still having lost specialist expertise that took years to build. PCMag Middle East has more on the studio’s attempt to calm fans.

A new Doom is reportedly already in motion

The strongest evidence that id isn’t being wound down comes from The Verge’s Tom Warren, who reports that despite the deep cuts, the studio has not been turned into a support team and is instead in the early stages of a new Doom game. That tracks with Xbox’s broader mandate of concentrating resources on its biggest, safest franchises.

The flip side of that focus is what likely got shelved. id had reportedly been exploring several non-Doom ideas, including a John Wick-inspired shooter called Fury, a survival Western with robots called Ironwood, and a pitch for a new Perfect Dark — all of which now look unlikely to move forward. For a studio that publicly prides itself on everyone being ‘a maker’, being narrowed back down to one franchise is its own kind of loss, even if that franchise happens to be Doom.