Xbox’s summer reset hit a lot of storied game studios very hard. Among them was id Software, the long-running maker of the iconic Doom franchise. Roughly half the studio was canned just 24 hours before it launched its big expansion to Doom: The Dark Ages. Questions have swirled about the studio’s future and what it will still be capable of after deep cuts to important departments that scattered decades of combined institutional knowledge. According to studio co-director Marty Stratton, things are still going swimmingly.
“We’re doing great,” he reportedly told media at a press event earlier this week when asked about the impact of the layoffs, according to IGN. “Not to handwave the [layoffs] away…everybody knows we had about half of our studio exit as part of that. But there was a very deliberate effort to make sure that we were incredibly viable coming out of that across everything we do, across game development and technology department.”
Big “My ‘incredibly viable studio’ T-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt” energy.
One of the big asterisks for id Software coming out of the brutal Xbox reset was the long-term sustainability of id Tech, the proprietary game engine upon which the studio’s world class first-person shooters are built. “It is hard to make a game that is AAA that’s like we’ve done before with half the people,” Chris Hays, a veteran programmer at the company, said in August. “And by hard I mean impossible.”
Id Software has previously pushed back on those claims, arguing that the studio is about where it was when it was shipping Doom 2016 nearly a decade ago. MachineGames, which is working on the unannounced Wolfenstein 3, uses a different fork of id Tech for its projects. One suggestion has been that both studios could pool their remaining engineering sources to try to bridge the gap for future releases.
“We’re working more closely with MachineGames than ever,” Stratton reportedly told media this week. “We’ve always had a very close partnership with them, 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]. 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.”
Xbox has about a quarter of its “reset” left to go, with additional rounds of layoffs reportedly scheduled for November and January. It remains to be seen what Microsoft’s plans are for franchises like Doom in the future.
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