I think we'll see stuff like this continue to happen over time. As a game company, having your own engine means that you have to be able to cultivate internal expertise in your tooling. Your employees will know this and could do bad things like ask for more money because they know that replacing them would significantly hurt productivity. Meanwhile, laying off your whole engine team and switching to UE5 means that you can get access to tons of low-wage contractors who know UE5. You can hire a bunch of them when you start a game project and then lay them all off when it's finished, and rinse and repeat as necessary. It lets you treat your employees as a replaceable commodity that can be scaled up and down as it makes monetary sense rather than a cohesive team of skilled artisans.
There's no real evidence in here that the IDTech team or the "coders" were specifically let go. I'm not saying it didn't happen but the article is just raging at the idea of it happening without presenting any evidence of it.
I can't help but think the industry will be better off in a few years after this Xbox "restructure." That's a lot of knowledge and talent that's no longer stuck in 14 layers of middle management hell.
Not the OP, but Scott Miller said "most if not all" coders at ID were laid off. https://www.gamesindustry.biz/xbox-layoffs-july-2026
I hope the industry will be in a better place in a few years. There is this recurring theme of big companies rolling up little developers and destroying their development culture.
It’s painful to watch this because the recipe for success at Microsoft is so obvious. They’ve just been fumbling the ball for so many years that it’s catching up to them.
And the thing is they’re not unprofitable. Gutting their studios and technology development isn’t going to help growth, it’s going to contract the business.
Growth over a long period of time involves two things: consistency in vision, and willingness to take risks.
We do not have a market designed to reward these things, at least not for the likes of Microsoft. For them, it's far easier to simply cut people while collecting on their previous labor. Once the product of that previous labor is no longer as valuable, it can then simply be spun off or shut down permanently.
In my experience, once organizations have enough history and size, they can't just pivot. Whatever happens within MS the organization makes it impossible for them to become anything other than what they've always been.
Their MO will always be EEE and they'll always (attempt to) abuse their monopoly power, while giving corpos and consumers just a glimmer of hope to keep them strung along...
Also any company they acquire will be gutted until it looks like the rest of the org.
Have you ever watched Shaq fall?
Microsoft’s Modus Operandi.
> Yet today, Microsoft/XBOX decided half the team was deemed USELESS and needed to be let go
I feel that this is an incredibly unfair and demeaning take both towards Microsoft and towards the people being fired. As I see it, getting fired is just like being dumped by a romantic partner. It typically says very little about your value as an individual, and almost everything about their current situation and how the relationship with you fits into their future plans and the other opportunities available to them.
Microsoft EEE at its best: gobble up all game studios and then kill them.
Microsoft needs to be split, it should been split years ago, but now more than ever.
RIP to the end of an era.
Was IdTech used outside of Id? Or was it just a Doom series thing as of recently?
Absolutely, the first versions until idTech 5 were open source and a number of important engines, like Source, derive from it.
Wikipedia actually has a family tree that's broader than I remembered: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/85/Quake_-_...
The CoD series, Source games (Half Life, Portal, Left 4 Dead), Titanfall, etc.
Wolfenstein series and recent Indiana Jones game were made in IdTech.
Wow, TIL Indiana was made with IdTech
IdTech 3-6 was used extensively by most FPS shooters back in the day.
No more DOOM games (((
Or future releases will just use Unreal Engine or something pre-existing :(
They were 100% working on the next game with idTech. Now the next release will for sure be delayed by a couple of years.
Fuck Microsoft.
They are moving most of their development to India, where it's pretty easy to find bottom-dollar UE5 dev shops.
I don't really understand. Id Software is owned by Microsoft? Why Microsoft can laying off employees of Id Software?
ZeniMax, the parent holding company of Bethesda Softworks/Bethesda Games, bought iD in 2009.[1] Microsoft bought ZeniMax for $7.5B in 2020 and assigned it to the Xbox division.[2] ZeniMax's board was subsequently dissolved, so it's entirely Microsoft.[3]
1: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/game-platforms/bethesda-parent...
2: https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2020/09/21/welcoming-bethesda-to...
3: https://www.gamespot.com/articles/zenimax-board-of-directors...
Yes. When ZeniMax owns Id, and Microsoft owns ZeniMax.
Some more earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48810496
Next: Blizzard
Considering how bad Blizzard has gotten the last 10 or so years, I would expect a bloodbath there. I don't know how they avoid it.
Blizzard's golden goose is WoW, and WoW is an ideal IP for a software company: you have people who have been playing it for two decades who will continue to pay a subscription no matter what. The hard work was done decades ago. id, on the other hand, has to keep making better and better new games every couple of years, and each one is a risk.
There's a reason game companies want to move towards the digital-only subscription model, and Xbox has been going that way for some time. As "bad" as Blizzard is, it's got the right model. That's what they care about, not about workplace culture or innovation.
Blizzard is such a shell now, that I doubt we'd notice.
why wouldn't they just sell it?
I'm deeply opposed to game distribution companies (console makers) being allowed to acquire game studios.
In the same way that theaters and streaming services shouldn't be allowed to do acquisitions.
Disney owning whatever ridiculous proportion of media by buying everything serves nobody's best interest.
> why wouldn't they just sell it?
Because someone who cares might buy the brand and do something good with it and be a competitor. ID Software is still a strong brand, and it the hands of another gaming studio it might pose a threat.
> why wouldn't they just sell it?
Serious question, is there any kind of entities that can be owned, but not "dismantled", if you don't want it you need to try to sell or make it independant.
Would there be any chance to make it a thing when a company is bought?
I get the impression European companies are like this. In general if a company can't be reorganized/dismantled that makes it worth so little (or negative) that no one will acquire it.
Likely one of two reasons, probably both:
1. Tax write off.
2. Acquiring a competitor, and then closing them down is a way to decrease competiton.
Really a sad day. DOOM was fantastic.
q3dm17 for life.
My favorite was rail brushing people off during pad jumps. Because they died from hitting the level box, they would get a -1. At work we had a match where every other player had a negative score. That aid, they were good sports about it and I didn't do it all the time.
Upon reading your comment I just booted quake3 in q3dm17 nightmare mode and immediately started having a blast. Was about to win the match but a bot took both the rail gun and the quad damage, it was a blood bath.
Who designed that map?
Anyone know?
Did it appear First in quake or quake III?
I've seen Brandon James (KillMe) credited in multiple places.[1][2] James left iD mid-development of Quake 3, so the rest of the level design team likely also contributed after that point.[3]
1: https://www.quora.com/Quake-series-Who-was-the-level-designe...
2: https://www.shacknews.com/article/101156/rocket-jump-quake-a...
3: https://www.shacknews.com/article/181/more-on-bjames-id-depa...
First appeared in Quake 3 Arena’s public demo
What the fuck
[dead]
The LinkedIn screenshot there is pathetic.
"I made a good game in 2016. I was paid for that; it was literally my job. Ten years later, they let me go." Oh no, boo hoo.
Also, the classic "everything is good when they pay me; when they stop paying me, they're evil." Are they not aware of how vile that makes them look?
There's an anecdote about Stalin (or someone else—maybe it's made up) where he plucks a chicken's feathers, and the thing is convulsing in pain. Then he offers it a handful of corn, and it starts eating from his hand. A man should strive to be better than an animal.
What's the development cycle of a major game? If someone worked on multiple games from start to finish for a studio, how many games would they have completed in a ten year span? Do game studios allow developers to talk about anything and eveyrthing they're working on in public or do they have them work under non-disclosure agreements?
10 years of employment with a fat salary. Sounds horrible
I firmly believe if software engineering unionization ever starts to take hold, it'll begin with game developers.
There's a lot of money in gaming but the workers are treated like shit, as you pointed out.
Sounds great until Epic realises they can charge whatever they like in licensing fees.
You're presenting this with ironic swipes like "bad things like ask for more money", but it's hard to read this description as anything but straightforwardly more efficient.
If there are few downsides to centralizing game engines, and the need for engine work is inherently cyclical, why should we want engine work to be internal and non-cyclical?
I really don't know much about game engines so maybe there are real downsides to that approach, but the way you've laid it out makes it seem as if Microsoft made the right decision here.