95 Devs Gone at id Software as Doom DLC Ships

Somewhere inside id Software today, a team shipped Doom: The Dark Ages - Revelations, a DLC expansion the studio had been building toward for months. Somewhere else inside id Software today, 95 of their colleagues were told they no longer have jobs. Both of those things happened on the same day, and I can't think of a crueller way to reward a team for finishing their work.

The layoffs are part of Xbox CEO Asha Sharma's sweeping restructure, which is cutting 3,200 jobs across Microsoft's gaming division by the end of financial year 2027. ZeniMax Media, the parent company that operates Bethesda and its studios, was hit especially hard. Former Bethesda Studios project lead Jeff Gardiner shared on X that 95 people were cut from id Software. By late 2025, when the studio signed union cards, id had roughly 185 staffers. If those numbers are accurate, that's more than half the studio gone.

The scale alone would be bad enough. What makes it worse is who reportedly got cut. Apogee and 3D Realms founder Scott Miller said a huge part of the layoffs hit id's coders, "including most (if not all)." That detail should alarm anyone who cares about id Tech, the proprietary engine behind every modern Doom and a piece of technology regularly cited as the best FPS engine in the business. If Microsoft's plan is to migrate id Software onto Unreal Engine or another off-the-shelf solution, they'd be gutting one of the few remaining studios that builds world-class engine technology in-house. I struggle to see how you preserve what makes id's games special after that.

What's Left of id

Digital Foundry's John Linneman also added he'd been hearing more about the full impact. "The disappointment here is off the charts," he wrote. Colin Geller, a principal concept artist at id for over 12 years, shared on LinkedIn that he'd been laid off after working on every new Doom project since 2016 and MachineGames' Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus.

"One of the truly special things about the studio was the sheer amount of skill amongst the team and the exciting and intense collaboration which is what made our games special and successful."

Principal character artist Denzil O'Neill, who worked on Doom: The Dark Ages, Doom Eternal, and Doom 2016 across 12 years at the studio, also confirmed he was among those let go. These aren't junior hires being trimmed from an overstaffed roster. These are senior artists and engineers who built the identity of modern Doom.

Bethesda boss Jill Braff framed the cuts in a staff email as a shift "from a planning model primarily centered on what's next for each independent studio to one that focuses on our strongest franchises." Xbox has named Doom and Quake as priority franchises going forward, but with a skeleton crew and potentially no in-house engine team, it's hard to see what "priority" means in practice. Bloomberg's Jason Schreier confirmed id Software and ZeniMax Online Studios had both lost staff as part of the broader restructure. Reports suggest what remains of id may end up in a support role, lending first-person shooter expertise to other Bethesda projects like MachineGames' expected Wolfenstein sequel.

I covered Xbox's wider cuts yesterday, including the closure or spin-off of studios like Double Fine and Ninja Theory, and the staggering admission that Xbox lost 64 cents on every dollar invested in first-party development. Id Software surviving as a named entity doesn't count for much when the people who made the games are walking out the door. Shipping a DLC on the same day you fire half the team that built it is the kind of decision that gets made in a spreadsheet, not a studio. Doom: The Dark Ages - Revelations launches today on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S.