I am absolutely fuming about this one because it's just so poorly timed — id Software slashed around half their staff, that’s over 90 redundancies per a Game Developer source, the same day they released a major expansion for Doom! Former employee Michael Maynard hit back on LinkedIn with an incredible rant about how Microsoft called this team "useless" despite them building arguably the best first-person engine in the industry and he wants everyone to know exactly what was lost. Even John Romero chimed in publicly because he knows better than anyone, having seen his own studio lose funding during a previous round of cuts and now expressing genuine shock at seeing id gutted like this after all their work. The irony is painful; they built games that defined the genre and Microsoft's cost-cutting just flattened it.
And it doesn't stop with id - Bloomberg reported ZeniMax, Bethesda Game Studios, and Zenix Online Studios were also decimated by these cuts as part of a "pivot to big franchises" strategy after what Jason Schreier called a gutting at the studios. Union rep Derrick Osobase is already warning that this will tank game quality and lead to longer release delays — which means we get worse games than we deserve, all for corporate line items. Then you look at the numbers: Xbox CEO Asha Sharma said 1600 were cut on Monday with another 1600 slated through fiscal year ending June 2027, added to a broader Microsoft cull of 4800 employees across the company. It's not just one studio; it's an entire ecosystem getting dismantled under this "reset."
The most chilling part is what we don't know yet because Blizzard president Johanna Faries released a memo saying teams should expect more details soon about their own future following these events - Activision titles are on the chopping block too. I can already see how Call of Duty and Overwatch will suffer if they keep cutting instead of hiring good people to replace them, which is exactly what I fear most. This isn't just "cost-cutting"; it's institutional knowledge being destroyed, decades worth of game design expertise deleted from the industry by spreadsheets rather than real planning. Every time id gets gutted like this we lose a piece of gaming history and no amount of corporate pivot can replace the people who built Doom in the first place.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/games/962223/doom-id-software-xbox-layoffs
And it doesn't stop with id - Bloomberg reported ZeniMax, Bethesda Game Studios, and Zenix Online Studios were also decimated by these cuts as part of a "pivot to big franchises" strategy after what Jason Schreier called a gutting at the studios. Union rep Derrick Osobase is already warning that this will tank game quality and lead to longer release delays — which means we get worse games than we deserve, all for corporate line items. Then you look at the numbers: Xbox CEO Asha Sharma said 1600 were cut on Monday with another 1600 slated through fiscal year ending June 2027, added to a broader Microsoft cull of 4800 employees across the company. It's not just one studio; it's an entire ecosystem getting dismantled under this "reset."
The most chilling part is what we don't know yet because Blizzard president Johanna Faries released a memo saying teams should expect more details soon about their own future following these events - Activision titles are on the chopping block too. I can already see how Call of Duty and Overwatch will suffer if they keep cutting instead of hiring good people to replace them, which is exactly what I fear most. This isn't just "cost-cutting"; it's institutional knowledge being destroyed, decades worth of game design expertise deleted from the industry by spreadsheets rather than real planning. Every time id gets gutted like this we lose a piece of gaming history and no amount of corporate pivot can replace the people who built Doom in the first place.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/games/962223/doom-id-software-xbox-layoffs