Iconic Doom and Quake developer id Software was among the most heavily impacted Microsoft-owned studios during Xbox CEO Asha Sharma’s devastating business “reset” earlier this year, with around 136 employees reportedly losing their jobs.
In the wake of those layoffs, id Software co-studio director Marty Stratton was recently asked about the current state of the developer, and how it has been affected by Sharma’s cuts. “We’re doing great,” Stratton told journalists at a recent event
“Not to handwave the [layoffs] away… everybody knows we had about half of our studio exit as part of that,” he continued. “But there was a very deliberate effort to make sure that we were incrediblydevelopment and technology department.”
This is not the first time a senior id Software member has pushed back on the narrative the studio has been “nerfed into the ground and gutted”. Hugo Martin, id’s other co-studio head previously claimed the remaining team is “the size we were when we made Doom 2016, and id Tech is very much alive and well”.
Sharma’s Xbox reset will ultimately see 3,200 jobs cut across Microsoft’s gaming division, with many of those still to come. Those impacted by the first wave of cuts in July, however, included developers working on the id Software’s id Tech engine. This is the engine behind all of the studio’s games, and is known to be among the most performant engines, consistently producing visually-impressive games that require modest specs to run.
Following the layoffs, many inside and outside the studio said the id Tech team had been gutted. Longtime id Software programmer Chris Hays, who notably wasn’t among those let go, said at the time, “It is hard to make a game that is triple-A, that is like we’ve done before, with half the people. And by hard I mean impossible”. Hays also claimed “entire departments” and “entire disciplines” are gone.
While Stratton hasn’t addressed those comments directly, he revealed id Software is now “working more closely than ever” with MachineGames, the Swedish studio behind the modern Wolfenstein games, and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. “We’ve always had a very close partnership with [MachineGames], but I think we’re at a point with technology development that both teams are incredibly talented and have incredibly talented engineers and we’re really on an amazing path that had started pre-[layoffs],” he explained.
“We’d kicked this off earlier this year. We’re really excited about that. We’re both really really bullish on what we have ahead.”
Id Software’s next project remains unclear. MachineGames, on the other hand, recently said it’s not done with Wolfenstein, so it’s possible a sequel to 2017’s The New Colossus is in the works.
