id Software co-director Marty Stratton says the Doom studio is “doing great” after roughly half of it was laid off in Xbox’s summer reset, and that id is now working more closely with Wolfenstein maker MachineGames than ever.
Stratton made the comments to media at a press event this week, as reported by IGN and picked up by Kotaku. Asked about the impact of the cuts, he said: “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.”
What happened to id Software?
The layoffs landed about 24 hours before id launched its big expansion for Doom: The Dark Ages. Kotaku notes the cuts hit important departments and scattered decades of institutional knowledge, part of a wider round of Xbox layoffs that hit Bethesda hard.
The biggest open question is id Tech, the in-house engine behind the studio’s shooters. Veteran id programmer Chris Hays said in August that making a AAA game like id’s past releases with half the people was “hard,” adding: “And by hard I mean impossible.” id has pushed back, arguing it is about where it was when it shipped Doom in 2016.
The MachineGames plan
MachineGames, which Kotaku says is working on an unannounced Wolfenstein 3, runs its own fork of id Tech. Stratton said the two studios are on “an amazing path” in technology development that started before the 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’s reset is not finished. Kotaku reports more layoff rounds are scheduled for November and January, and Microsoft has not said what comes next for Doom.
