id Software loses half of its developers in Xbox cuts

The public outpouring that exposed this wound came from one of the house's oldest minds, the veteran Michael Maynard, who used his personal account on the professional network LinkedIn to lament the termination after dedicating 21 continuous years of service to the studio. The programmer closely followed all the technical evolution of the brand, working since the creation of the RAGE engine to the recently announced Doom: The Dark Ages. The professional did not hide his sadness in seeing a pioneering company, responsible for revolutionizing the computer industry, being treated as a mere disposable number in a corporate reorganization spreadsheet. It is stomach-churning to see professionals who shaped the first-person shooter genre receiving a termination notice as a reward for decades of dedication.

“Yes, I was part of the team (around 50% of the company) that got laid off today.”

So far, the top management of Microsoft has chosen institutional silence and has not officially confirmed the exact number of workers affected by the cuts at the Texas developer. Initial rumors circulating behind the scenes in the industry last week suggested that the layoffs had reached about 95 developers at the headquarters. However, the strong testimony of Michael Maynard suggests that the actual damage was far more overwhelming, dispelling the notion that the elite studios of the group were shielded from the crisis.

In his statements, the former employee made a point of highlighting the recent legacy of id Software, recalling that the flawless sequence comprised of Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal returned the brand to the absolute top of the market. Even delivering profitable products, with extremely high technical quality and unanimous public acclaim, the studio ended up punished by the platform owner's excessive greed. This drastic cut line sounds like a bizarre contradiction, especially since the new charter of Bethesda states that the objective of the restructuring is precisely to prioritize and concentrate investments in established franchises like Doom itself, in addition to Fallout, The Elder Scrolls, Quake, and Wolfenstein.

Dismantling the original team that knows how to program and extract the best from this proprietary engine for the future is an unprecedented managerial stupidity. Destroying the internal morale of such an awarded team in this way leaves us extremely apprehensive about the level of polish that upcoming projects will present. The current market seems hostage to executives focused solely on pleasing investors in the short term, even if it costs the creative oxygen of their most talented and historic studios.