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Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software
- SurajMishra 3mo agoReally a sad day. DOOM was fantastic.
- ranger_danger 3mo agoq3dm17 for life.
- jaffa2 3mo agoWho designed that map? Anyone know? Did it appear First in quake or quake III?
- michaelsbradley 3mo agoFirst appeared in Quake 3 Arena’s public demo
- starkparker 3mo agoI've seen Brandon James (KillMe) credited in multiple places.[1][2] James left iD mid-development of Quake 3, so the rest of the level design team likely also contributed after that point.[3] 1: https://www.quora.com/Quake-series-Who-was-the-level-designer-for-q3dm17 https://www.quora.com/Quake-series-Who-was-the-level-designe... 2: https://www.shacknews.com/article/101156/rocket-jump-quake-and-the-golden-age-of-first-person-shooters?page=16 https://www.shacknews.com/article/101156/rocket-jump-quake-a... 3: https://www.shacknews.com/article/181/more-on-bjames-id-departure https://www.shacknews.com/article/181/more-on-bjames-id-depa...
- amlib 3mo agoUpon reading your comment I just booted quake3 in q3dm17 nightmare mode and immediately started having a blast. Was about to win the match but a bot took both the rail gun and the quad damage, it was a blood bath.
- hamdingers 3mo agohttps://thelongestyard.link/q3a-demo/ https://thelongestyard.link/q3a-demo/
- whacked_new 3mo agoq3dm17 in the browser... what a time to be alive
- genxy 3mo agoMy favorite was rail brushing people off during pad jumps. Because they died from hitting the level box, they would get a -1. At work we had a match where every other player had a negative score. That aid, they were good sports about it and I didn't do it all the time.
- markus_zhang 3mo agoI was thinking, is that the space hopping map? Because I didn’t play much MP back in the day but that map was a blast. Checked online and indeed that’s the one! I wonder what is the biggest online community nowadays that I can play MP with.
- Narishma 3mo agoI never liked this map and don't get its popularity. Same for the one in UT99 with the two towers on an asteroid. They're just too brainless and chaotic for my taste.
- sorry_outta_gas 3mo ago[dead]
- koteelok 3mo agoNo more DOOM games (((
- owlninja 3mo agoOr future releases will just use Unreal Engine or something pre-existing :(
- koteelok 3mo agoThey were 100% working on the next game with idTech. Now the next release will for sure be delayed by a couple of years. Fuck Microsoft.
- sph 3mo agoThe new one is 67% off on Steam. Just got it myself
- mococa 3mo agoNext: Blizzard
- datakan 3mo agoConsidering how bad Blizzard has gotten the last 10 or so years, I would expect a bloodbath there. I don't know how they avoid it.
- lenerdenator 3mo agoBlizzard's golden goose is WoW, and WoW is an ideal IP for a software company: you have people who have been playing it for two decades who will continue to pay a subscription no matter what. The hard work was done decades ago. id, on the other hand, has to keep making better and better new games every couple of years, and each one is a risk. There's a reason game companies want to move towards the digital-only subscription model, and Xbox has been going that way for some time. As "bad" as Blizzard is, it's got the right model. That's what they care about, not about workplace culture or innovation.
- tyfon 3mo agoFor me they are killing the goose. WoW has become quite soulless after the changes where everyone gets the same end game equipment but you have to grind upgrade currency to improve it. My wife and I used to play quite a bit but it doesn't really engage anymore. Perhaps we are getting too old, but we should be in the correct customer segment (mid 40 years old). Now I have spun up a local wotlk server with player bots powered by ollama which is actually a bit fun again.
- lenerdenator 3mo agoI agree, that approach to game development is soulless. I don't really play any new video games anymore. In the rare instance I do play games, it's something from 15+ years ago. The games were designed to be played, beaten, and that was it. It wasn't an effort to keep you locked in forever. It became that. Then it became a soulless effort to keep you locked in forever. Unfortunately, soul doesn't matter. The quarterly statement does.
- colechristensen 3mo agowhy wouldn't they just sell it? I'm deeply opposed to game distribution companies (console makers) being allowed to acquire game studios. In the same way that theaters and streaming services shouldn't be allowed to do acquisitions. Disney owning whatever ridiculous proportion of media by buying everything serves nobody's best interest.
- mrweasel 3mo ago> why wouldn't they just sell it? Because someone who cares might buy the brand and do something good with it and be a competitor. ID Software is still a strong brand, and it the hands of another gaming studio it might pose a threat.
- kreco 3mo ago> why wouldn't they just sell it? Serious question, is there any kind of entities that can be owned, but not "dismantled", if you don't want it you need to try to sell or make it independant. Would there be any chance to make it a thing when a company is bought?
- wmf 3mo agoI get the impression European companies are like this. In general if a company can't be reorganized/dismantled that makes it worth so little (or negative) that no one will acquire it.
- jayd16 3mo agoIt's fairly common for a studio to buy its independence and keep the team intact. You do need fresh money to make it worthwhile and give the new studio runway. There's also the case where new teams can self organize to form new studios in the aftermath. That's also a factor on whether it makes sense to pay for the previous name or game license, or simply start over.
- colechristensen 3mo agoYou can put various kinds of "poison pill" in the shareholder rights agreements which are binding contracts on both the company and its shareholders in response to events. You can also make all sort of post acquisition agreements. These usually take the form of making stock available at steep discounts in response to actions e.g. in the event of a 20% layoff any employee from the time of acquisition can purchase stock at $0.10 a share, any one laid off will get a million dollars severance, if acquirer shuts down the studio the original founders have the right to re-acquire all IP and trademarks for $1 -- those sorts of things. This isn't a specific kind of entity, any business entity can have Shareholder Rights Agreements. It's a bit of a game to get the terms right so everything is in good faith and agreeable.
- Catloafdev 3mo agoRIP to the end of an era. Was IdTech used outside of Id? Or was it just a Doom series thing as of recently?
- koteelok 3mo agoWolfenstein series and recent Indiana Jones game were made in IdTech.
- HeavyStorm 3mo agoWow, TIL Indiana was made with IdTech
- Hikikomori 3mo agoNot sure if I'd call that outside Id as its all Zenimax.
- pier25 3mo agoDidn't love the gameplay but the Indiana Jones game looks absolutely phenomenal.
- lysace 3mo agoThis explains the connection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MachineGames#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MachineGames#History I wonder what's happening to MachineGames...
- ge96 3mo agoWolfenstein is great lore and art
- eightysixfour 3mo agoThere's no real evidence in here that the IDTech team or the "coders" were specifically let go. I'm not saying it didn't happen but the article is just raging at the idea of it happening without presenting any evidence of it. I can't help but think the industry will be better off in a few years after this Xbox "restructure." That's a lot of knowledge and talent that's no longer stuck in 14 layers of middle management hell.
- georgeecollins 3mo agoNot the OP, but Scott Miller said "most if not all" coders at ID were laid off. https://www.gamesindustry.biz/xbox-layoffs-july-2026 https://www.gamesindustry.biz/xbox-layoffs-july-2026 I hope the industry will be in a better place in a few years. There is this recurring theme of big companies rolling up little developers and destroying their development culture.
- eightysixfour 3mo agoYes, it was mentioned in the article. I just don't count a tweet from an "insider" as particularly strong evidence anymore.
- CuriouslyC 3mo agoMiller has a history with id, and has probably gotten numerous reports directly from boots on the ground in the company.
- starkparker 3mo agoSounds like Digital Foundry's also looking into it, without much detail or confirmation: https://bsky.app/profile/dark1x.bsky.social/post/3mpyvnrbwds2t https://bsky.app/profile/dark1x.bsky.social/post/3mpyvnrbwds...
- bix6 3mo ago> There is this recurring theme of big companies rolling up little developers and destroying their development culture Why are the little devs selling to the big companies in the first place then? If you’re crushing it as an Indie studio why wouldn’t you stay that way knowing how big tech acts?
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- Grombobulous 3mo agoIt’s painful to watch this because the recipe for success at Microsoft is so obvious. They’ve just been fumbling the ball for so many years that it’s catching up to them. And the thing is they’re not unprofitable. Gutting their studios and technology development isn’t going to help growth, it’s going to contract the business.
- bigbuppo 3mo agoHave you ever watched Shaq fall?
- reactordev 3mo agoMicrosoft’s Modus Operandi.
- __patchbit__ 3mo agoHuman labor plus AI tokens must double input capital on loop track output.
- reactordev 3mo agoYeah, see slide 14 of the Microsoft Promise deck
- lenerdenator 3mo agoGrowth over a long period of time involves two things: consistency in vision, and willingness to take risks. We do not have a market designed to reward these things, at least not for the likes of Microsoft. For them, it's far easier to simply cut people while collecting on their previous labor. Once the product of that previous labor is no longer as valuable, it can then simply be spun off or shut down permanently.
- eightysixfour 3mo agoI actually think this is the wrong diagnosis of this situation. The studios in Microsoft gaming appear to have been given a lot of room to take risks under previous leadership, build passion projects, etc. while letting big franchises sit on the side. Those things ended up being anywhere from abject failures to small successes - where some players and critics loved them - but most don't seem to be commercial successes. In the meantime we haven't seen a new Quake, Fallout, Elder Scrolls, Perfect Dark, Fable, Banjo, Conker, or the myriad of other mainstream IP they owned in decades. Most of these franchises have lost a ton of value after sitting on the shelf for so long without releases.
- ndiddy 3mo agoI think we'll see stuff like this continue to happen over time. As a game company, having your own engine means that you have to be able to cultivate internal expertise in your tooling. Your employees will know this and could do bad things like ask for more money because they know that replacing them would significantly hurt productivity. Meanwhile, laying off your whole engine team and switching to UE5 means that you can get access to tons of low-wage contractors who know UE5. You can hire a bunch of them when you start a game project and then lay them all off when it's finished, and rinse and repeat as necessary. It lets you treat your employees as a replaceable commodity that can be scaled up and down as it makes monetary sense rather than a cohesive team of skilled artisans.
- SteveNuts 3mo agoI firmly believe if software engineering unionization ever starts to take hold, it'll begin with game developers. There's a lot of money in gaming but the workers are treated like shit, as you pointed out.
- londons_explore 3mo agoWith the current trajectory of AI, I see unionisation efforts dead in the water.
- Alex-C137 3mo agoWhich current trajectory are you referring to?
- mock-possum 3mo ago100% disagree. If the software engineers strike, who’s going to be left to wrangle the AI? I would love to see what a game developer - nevermind released - that way would look like.
- bayarearefugee 3mo ago> If the software engineers strike, who’s going to be left to wrangle the AI? The scabs who don't strike? I'm pro-union and unlike the person you are responding to I'm not sure things are "dead in the water", but I do think software developers had a much better leg to stand on to push for unionization a few years ago than they have now (and, probably, going forward).
- HeavyStorm 3mo agoWhat the fuck
- feelamee 3mo agoI don't really understand. Id Software is owned by Microsoft? Why Microsoft can laying off employees of Id Software?
- advisedwang 3mo agoYes. When ZeniMax owns Id, and Microsoft owns ZeniMax.
- starkparker 3mo agoZeniMax, the parent holding company of Bethesda Softworks/Bethesda Games, bought iD in 2009.[1] Microsoft bought ZeniMax for $7.5B in 2020 and assigned it to the Xbox division.[2] ZeniMax's board was subsequently dissolved, so it's entirely Microsoft.[3] 1: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/game-platforms/bethesda-parent-zenimax-acquires-id-software https://www.gamedeveloper.com/game-platforms/bethesda-parent... 2: https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2020/09/21/welcoming-bethesda-to-the-xbox-family/ https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2020/09/21/welcoming-bethesda-to... 3: https://www.gamespot.com/articles/zenimax-board-of-directors-dissolved-after-xboxs-bethesda-purchase/1100-6488918/ https://www.gamespot.com/articles/zenimax-board-of-directors...
- genxy 3mo agoIf that isn't a perfect piece of antitrust evidence, how crazy is it that MS can reach across a whole industry and buy the company that bought the company that defined the games industry, with Carmack playing revenge of the nerds boy genius. Everything about it is perfect for a locally produced drama somewhere in eastern europe.
- moralestapia 3mo ago[flagged]
- allthetime 3mo ago10 years of employment with a fat salary. Sounds horrible
- bigbuppo 3mo agoWhat's the development cycle of a major game? If someone worked on multiple games from start to finish for a studio, how many games would they have completed in a ten year span? Do game studios allow developers to talk about anything and eveyrthing they're working on in public or do they have them work under non-disclosure agreements?
- moralestapia 3mo agoWho cares about any of that? He was being paid. It was not a charity, it was work. Companies don't owe you anything. (And you don't owe them anything, either.) Work is a temporary agreement to provide services in exchange for money. That's it. Understand how the world works.
- bigbuppo 3mo agoWell I hope you get exactly what you want.
- someguynamedq 3mo agounderstand != want
- onraglanroad 3mo agoPeople who understand society care about it. When you employ someone you take on a certain responsibility. You can't negate that by pretending that you're in an equal power relationship. That's why we have workers' rights.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- ChrisArchitect 3mo agoRelated: Resetting Xbox https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48804993 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48804993
- iamleppert 3mo agoThey are moving most of their development to India, where it's pretty easy to find bottom-dollar UE5 dev shops.
- tayo42 3mo agoDo they make good games though? Idk if game dev is like corporate software where it's already uncreative crap no one really is thrilled about.
- isityettime 3mo agoA lot of games are, including some of the most popular franchises. Sequel mills often become like this
- hbn 3mo agoThe rebooted Doom trilogy is more or less the only FPS games I've ever particularly enjoyed
- pipes 3mo agoDo you have a source for this ?
- teamonkey 3mo agoIt’s not “moving to India” so much as Western studios are now forming smaller core teams locally and farming out much of the content to outsourcing studios in India, Malaysia & Eastern Europe rather than doing it all in-house.
- ntSean 3mo agoAs someone in the industry, I have not seen this across studios. If you farm out art, you end up with a confused set of props / designs. If you farm out code, you end up with a mess of different assumptions and patterns. If you’re designing and considering everything, then you’re essentially running a studio but now remotely from another country.
- falcor84 3mo ago> Yet today, Microsoft/XBOX decided half the team was deemed USELESS and needed to be let go I feel that this is an incredibly unfair and demeaning take both towards Microsoft and towards the people being fired. As I see it, getting fired is just like being dumped by a romantic partner. It typically says very little about your value as an individual, and almost everything about their current situation and how the relationship with you fits into their future plans and the other opportunities available to them.
- dymk 3mo agoIt’s nothing like a romantic relationship, and it does say something about msft: they failed at planning and managing company resources, and as a result fired a bunch of people
- falcor84 3mo agoIt sounds like you're fully agreeing with me that it has pretty much nothing to do with the value of the employees and essentially everything with how the employees no longer fit the company's plans.
- dymk 3mo agoI think if you read the words I wrote you’ll find I did not agree with your framing
- falcor84 3mo agoI promise that I did, and I did not find that; you said that it's "nothing like" but then the rest of it seems to match what I was saying in my analogy. Would you mind please saying more about the difference you see between our opinions?
- lenerdenator 3mo agoThe problem with the romantic partner analogy is that when things ended with my ex, I didn't lose my career continuity, health insurance and income stream that goes to pay my rent. Corporate culture spent the last fifty years convincing the working public that it was important to identify with your job, career, and most importantly, your employer. That's how you get the most out of a worker. If they identify themselves as - just as examples - "parent" or "spouse" first, those priorities can get in the way of their value creation for you. The employer can, of course, drop you as an employee pretty much at-will. You'll be left with shame, disillusionment, and potential financial setbacks, but they'll have accumulated the value from your best efforts.
- ChrisArchitect 3mo agoSome more earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48810496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48810496
- SurgeArrest 3mo agoMicrosoft EEE at its best: gobble up all game studios and then kill them. Microsoft needs to be split, it should been split years ago, but now more than ever.
- pfdietz 3mo ago> at its best This looks more like simple corporate incompetence. They never should have made those very expensive acquisitions.
- thewebguyd 3mo agoThey should never have been allowed to make those acquisitions. Especially after they misled the FTC about Activision/Blizzard remaining independent and easily spun off again, and then immediately fired 1900 people afterwards forcing them to integrate more tightly into Microsoft gaming.
- pfdietz 3mo agoThe FTC isn't there to stop corporations from making mistakes. Subsequent events show concerns of monopolization were misplaced.
- embedding-shape 3mo ago> The FTC isn't there to stop corporations from making mistakes. That's not the point parent is trying to make either, but FTC was supposed to prevent detrimental anti-competitive and monopolistic behaviors, which that very much was.
- pfdietz 3mo agoI don't think you can view the horrific performance of MSFT's gaming division as an example of successful anticompetitive behavior. It is not in any way sustainable, as demonstrated by their slash and burn actions now.
- georgemcbay 3mo agoRemember when Satya Nadella and Bobby Kotick got up in court and told everyone how all these giant Xbox mergers would be good for the consumer and went after Lina Khan for suggesting that maybe that wasn't the case? Who woulda thunk they were full of crap...? (besides everyone who didn't have a financial stake in the deal)
- moogly 3mo agoOn the same day they release the new Dark Ages DLC. The game industry continues to be brutal.
- LarsDu88 3mo agoMicrosoft, one the world's greatest monopolists, bequeaths a game engine monopoly unto Epic Games, in one the biggest corporate blunders of all time. If they were smarter about this, they would commoditize their compliment and open source the Doom The Dark Ages engine just like John Carmack did with the Quake 3 engine.
- CuriouslyC 3mo agoThe industry is skewing heavily indie now, and there's no money in the indie game engine segment. Maybe a few AAA titles will be unhappy that Epic can negotiate more aggressively, but mostly this is a nothingburger, particularly given idTech's rep for batteries not included.
- bcjdjsndon 3mo agoAmong us made $105 million. I'd say there's plenty of money in indie, so long as your not rehashing other people's games yet again.... (Though the FPS industry, a long running doom clone saga, does just fine on this premise)
- TylerE 3mo agoWhat monopoly did they gift? IdTech hasn't been licensed to external companies in over 15 years, and several major versions ago. The last non-Id release on IdTech was Brink in 2011.
- LarsDu88 3mo agoMSFT could have opened up idTech completely since they make 0 dollars from licensing the engine anyways. Microsoft's game divisions make money through making games, so opening up the engine itself would've been conducive to their goals (cultivating an ecosystem of devs and even contractors familiar with the tooling). idTech rendering is more competitive with Epic's Unreal technology than Unity and Godot. They should simply open source it if they fire the devs. Else the engine and future support for the games built on it are essentially being tossed into the trash.
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- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- danjl 3mo agoPerhaps also a bit of ageism. Always hard to prove. Often implicit.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3mo ago$2.93 trillion market cap....layoffs Bizarre incentives we have created
- epolanski 3mo agoTheir gaming division is not doing well. Those are de facto separate organizations.
- HDThoreaun 3mo agomsft gaming likely has a negative market cap
- FrustratedMonky 3mo agoToo bad they didn't double down and sell the Id Tech Engine and be a competitor to UE. Instead of folding.
- cwillu 3mo agoAppears hugged: https://archive.ph/EIiLP https://archive.ph/EIiLP
- tibbydudeza 3mo agoUnreal Engine has become a commodity, and it is easier to recruit people with experience - even CD Projekt Red gave up. The only major studios doing their own thing is Rockstar and Bethesda. I would not include Cloud Imperium here because they are forever in a beta state with no clear ship date in the future for their two games.
- bathtub365 3mo agoAlso IO Interactive, Guerrilla Games, Santa Monica Studio
- pipes 3mo agoTechnology advances and platform variation were a key part of why games where so exciting. It feels like that period is now over, it is difficult to get excited any of it now. The whole industry just seems stale and corporate. Or maybe I'm just old. What's really odd is it is now easier than ever to create games but at the same time it feels like we won't see revolutionary games like doom, quake, Goldeneye or half life ever again. These were created by small teams that could inject their personality into them. My other theory is game creation was previously so hard, it required genius level iq teams to do it so we quite regularly got mind blowingly amazing games. Now we get cut scenes instead.
- to11mtm 3mo ago> The only major studios doing their own thing is Rockstar and Bethesda. Is Ubisoft's Anvil still alive or is it just in an unknown status after they cancelled a few upcoming titles? That said, Capcom is still doing their own thing via RE Engine... Not sure about any others...
- sgt 3mo agoI actually started my game now in LÖVE 2d.
- hbn 3mo ago> The only major studios doing their own thing is Rockstar and Bethesda. Don't forget Nintendo. It's pretty damn impressive what they managed to pull off on the Switch with more or less circa-2015 Android hardware. Mario Odyssey looks beautiful and runs at a mostly stable 60fps.
- CuriouslyC 3mo agoGame devs have been heavily unionizing lately, including Blizzard and WotC. I wonder how long long it takes before we have a union game dev studio basically mutiny and completely disregard the instructions of the corporate suits, and force the choice of either shuttering the studio completely or caving to the workers.
- jasonlotito 3mo agoYesterday. "In France, Arkane's management is beginning required consultation with its Works Council to review potential strategic options."
- 0xWTF 3mo agoInterestingly, Id was led by John Carmack, who was also a big fan of VR. And Microsoft killed the AR/VR/MR teams a year ago. So, I'm guessing internally there were some leadership hopes that IdTech would help support IVAS and related professional AR systems and when those failed to be adopted at scale, IdTech lost a key sponsor. I'm guessing it's been a rough year of internal advocacy since.
- bathtub365 3mo agoCarmack hasn’t worked at id for 13 years
- bcjdjsndon 3mo agoCarmack had left id by the time he got into vr/at, iirc they snagged him from a rocket company?
- azornathogron 3mo agoArmadillo Aerospace was Carmack's own rocket company. And tbh I'm not sure it was ever a plausible contender for commercial success, more like Carmack wanted to play with rockets. But that might be unfair; I would happily accept a correction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armadillo_Aerospace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armadillo_Aerospace
- DarkNova6 3mo agoCarmack left id waaay before Microsoft has acquired id (transitively by acquiring Zenimax/Bethesda)
- kpeek0 3mo agoThis doesn't seem to be correct. Its amazing how one tweet can go so broad even when its not accurate. Tiago Sousa, Billy Khan, Phillip Hammer, Dominik Lazarek all seem like they are still at Id
- Cort3z 3mo agoDon’t sell you company to Microsoft then
- epolanski 3mo agoAB was publicly traded and the majority of shareholders voted yes.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- chilmers 3mo agoIt's sad to watch corporate leadership try to fix problems with tactics that will only make them worse. MS bought successful studios who were successful precisely because their of unique technical and design culture. Now they plan to homogenise them into a content-creation blob that will churn out entries for existing franchises, using the same tools and approaches as the rest of the industry. Anything that was special or unique about those studios and their games will be lost, and the result will be a downward spiral of mediocrity that will cause players to lose interest even further.
- sailorganymede 3mo agoThis is the thing that annoys me. They have the Fallout series hostage and moves like this sadden me because I can't expect the next game to particularly great when stuff like this happens.
- inigyou 3mo agoYou can make a fallout game yourself if you don't call it fallout.
- danparsonson 3mo ago"Radioactive Dust 5" doesn't have quite the same ring to it though
- inigyou 3mo agoAlternative trademarks never do. Every company gets started anyway. I'm sure International Business Machines felt they sounded like a low budget knock-off of National Cash Register. Radioactive Dust is quite uninspired though, how about Super Nuclear Apocalypse Bros DX
- bad_login 3mo agoWhat about "wasteland" ?
- CrimsonCape 3mo agoLooking at Asha Sharma's track record of having no experience in anything related to gaming, don't color me surprised when in 6 months the foisted narrative will be 'well, do we even need an Xbox?'
- bathtub365 3mo agoPhil Spencer had already put it in the ditch by the time she took over. “Everything is an Xbox” was a joke of a strategy, spending $70 billion on a company with a weak slate in the Activision purchase
- datakan 3mo agoI'm not sure thats all on Phil. He was told they needed 30% profit margins or else. He was grasping and trying to make that happen when they only had 12% (market average was something like 10). This really feels like Phil was setup to take a fall and Asha is swooping in to either be a hero or sell it all off so Microsoft can focus on AI.
- bathtub365 3mo agoThat’s a fair point. I do think Game Pass was a major strategic misstep, but I assume they were also pushed to show regular recurring revenue which obviously flies in the face of a traditional game publisher’s revenue pattern.
- pier25 3mo agoLooks like Microsoft is desperate for more cash to burn on AI and making drastic decisions like this. Sure the Xbox division wasn't doing amazing but still had $24B of revenue in 2025. For reference PlayStation made $30B that same year.
- pyrolistical 3mo agoWithin an order of magnitude. I would call this awash
- dwroberts 3mo agoFast forward a few years “where did all our institutional knowledge about performance and rendering go??” So utterly predictable it’s infuriating
- legitster 3mo agoI have a friend who works at Ubisoft. Even 10+ years ago, she clearly saw the writing on the wall - the massive developer/publisher consolidation was going terribly: - Every studio uses their own custom set of tools and development practices. The economies of scale of merging studios together just doesn't really exist. - The functional difference between most engines for consumers at this point is largely meaningless. There are no order of magnitude gains like there used to be. Most of the engineering is on the cloud services architecture or anti-cheat. - The median "developer" at a game studio is not actually a very technical person. They mostly just spend their days inputting content and assets with the available tools. - The value of a AAA game is not how innovative the gameplay is but how much content they were able to stuff into the game. - Nobody cares about "exclusives" anymore when 90% of AAAs have interchangeable gameplay with other AAAs. - The cost to start a new studio is negligible compared to the cost of acquiring existing IP.
- markus_zhang 3mo agoIMO, people should stop chasing making AAA games or whatever nVidia pushed out. They should just build games instead of graphics demos that sometimes sold well. They can stick to desktops 10 years ago, make smaller teams, and either build their own engine or use something that is not UE5.
- ThatPlayer 3mo agoTen year old desktop users aren't exactly known for buying new games, especially at full price. The average spending gaming hardware are the consoles. No one is going to start building a game targeting a Playstation 4 today, they'll target the 5 year old PS5.
- Narishma 3mo ago> No one is going to start building a game targeting a Playstation 4 today, they'll target the 5 year old PS5. That's not true. New games are still being made for and released on PS4 and will still be for the next few years. If the PS4 hardware is enough for your game, you can just release there and people can play it on PS4 or PS5. https://www.pushsquare.com/guides/new-ps4-games-release-dates-in-2026 https://www.pushsquare.com/guides/new-ps4-games-release-date...
- iepathos 3mo agoWow, that tweet claiming the Doom series is the best first person action game in the entire industry is crazy. That dev has to be completely disconnected from the rest of the game industry or delusional. No stats support that claim at all. Not player count, not sales, not reviews, nothing. The first Doom was certainly industry defining, but it and its sequels have never been considered the best by anyone except apparently this dev. If they were the best, they probably wouldn't be getting laid off right now.
- parasti 3mo agoThey worked on the reboot games which are considered widely successful relative to other games released around the same time.
- iepathos 3mo agoSure, the tweet was about their releases since 2016 when I assume this particular dev was involved, not the original release. To be clear, I'm not saying their games aren't good or even that they didn't have some success. 20 million in sales for their entire franchise isn't bad, it isn't the 500 million in sales we see from CoD or Battlefield, but it isn't bad. I actually liked the games, but claiming they are the "BEST GAMES EVER!" and having the gall to mention Google where no Google results ever show them as the best is where I have an issue. We don't need to spread misinformation like that and if the dev actually believes this I can only assume they live in a bubble.
- theshackleford 3mo agoIf numbers suggest quality than I guess McDonald’s makes the worlds best hamburger.
- zuzululu 3mo ago[flagged]
- Capricorn2481 3mo agoFirst of all, we're talking about Doom here. I doubt Doom is too alienating for heterosexual audiences. Doesn't that seem like an extremely inorganic segue into identity politics? Secondly, The "go woke or broke" thing has been a Schrodinger's mantra used by grifters to sell outrage. Everything is woke until it succeeds, and then suddenly it was always predetermined to succeed. The market, on the whole, doesn't seem to care about or pay attention to these things as much as you imply. The worst examples, like Concord, are games that are shit across the board and compete in really crowded markets. The "Sweet baby" watch group on steam flagged Elden Ring, for christsake. If anything, the indie games are even more woke. But there is certainly a loud minority that will insist this is a massive threat to the industry. I for one cannot wait until people learn how to criticize games again. It's unfortunate good game criticism is being overtaken by to a crowd of tourists that flatten game quality to a checklist of anti woke signifiers. It sucks. But it mostly affects internet comments. I think the fact that you are not a gamer but the first thing you think of when you imagine what gamers care about is Sweet Baby Inc says more about the content you consume.
- zuzululu 3mo ago> says more about the content you consume i can say the exact same for you and take a guess as to what your political leanings are but to be polite i'll leave it alone and agree to disagree
- Capricorn2481 3mo ago> i can say the exact same for you and take a guess as to what your political leanings No, you can't really. You already said you don't even play videogames. The mere fact that you imply Doom was too woke speaks volumes to how little interest you have in actually understanding the current landscape. You can't be an outsider to the hobby, make such slanted claims, and then accuse people who actually like games and interact with others who play them of being disingenuous. We view them holistically, you can only observe them through the lens of the political content you consume. And if that's the content you consume, you will more readily believe every Triple A game is stuffed to the gills with overt political messaging. The ironic part being Triple A studios tend to be the most safe and sanitized fence sitters of the industry and it's the indie games that tend to be more progressive and alienating. But you aren't going to see that irony because you aren't playing any of these games to begin with, which is what made your comment comedic. When people say tourists are coming and politicizing the hobby, you are who they are talking about. I am telling you that not to point and laugh, but to let you know you're uninformed.
- stego-tech 3mo agoThis hurts, in a very specific way. Those coders are legendary wizards of the craft, understanding engine design and systems architecture in a way nobody else in the industry does. This is a team that could get 200fps+ in their games with RT on and no dynamic reconstruction or upscaling to be had, at a time when everyone else mandated such shortcuts to have even 30-45fps at a similar resolution. They did all this while also working closely with the actual game designers, to make sure the tech was usable instead of obfuscatory or hindering to production. The fact Microsoft just fired them all, at a time when their remaining studios desperately need help with their aging, shitty engines? I can’t think of a better indicator that they haven’t a fucking clue about what they’re doing, here.
- ironman1478 3mo agoJust to play devils advocate, was all of that worth it? There are equally fun or more fun indie games that don't have great graphics, but the gameplay is astounding. DUSK is an example of this. I love that these teams are pushing boundaries of technology, but it also points to an issue with modern game AAA development. It's expensive to make these beautiful games and it's not like they are more enjoyable than games made cheaper.
- willis936 3mo agoWhy compare to indie games? MS family game studios aren't making indie games, they're churning out faceless UE malaise. You should be comparing id tech games to UE games.
- ironman1478 3mo agoThe point is that MS is spending a crap ton of money to produce a product that is marginally better gameplay wise than a game like DUSK, which was made by a few people (I actually liked DUSK more but this isn't a game review thread). Not every game should be made on the cheap, but these game studios do cost a lot of money and suffer from diminishing returns. For how expensive these games are to make, they should be churning out ES sized games all the time. Instead the new DOOM is some 20ish hour campaign that costs MS a lot and the consumer a lot. I don't even think many people liked it compared to the last ones due to the slower movement. It's not fair to these people that they lost their jobs but also they work in a risky low margin business and as you go for more and more advanced graphics and tech, the lower the margins.
- neko_ranger 3mo agoEither John or John should buy back the Id Software name
- markus_zhang 3mo agoI don’t think they are interested or have the $$$. It probably worths like a billion?
- lain98 3mo agoI was fired by microsoft last year, Satya said the layoff was not due to performance reasons and he refused to elaborate what it was. In the job market I had to explain at every interview why I was laid off. People still ask me why I left MS to work at my current less prestigious company when the learn I used to work there and I have to sheepishly repeat the lie I have memorised to make them go away. Even when I was at MS I saw a culture of always being in firing and hiring mode. They fired people who were perfectly good at their jobs and hired people who needed to be trained and needed higher salaries. Sorry Satya. I just can't trust MS with my career anymore and I dissuade more people from going there everyday. ¯\(ツ)/¯
- markus_zhang 3mo agoI also worked in a public company that bought a lot of companies during the pandemic and had to sell or shut them down in the wake of 2024. My cynical take is that a lot of VC/fund bros need their cash during the pandemic and they saw a high in the market so installed their friends to buy those assets. Scroll forward 5, 6 years, they now do the reverse to pump up stock prices of those parent companies and win big again. It has nothing to do with the parent companies themselves. They are just a tool to pump and dump.
- notnullorvoid 3mo agoI'm going to choose to look at this in a positive light. In the long term this talent will feed into more indie games and studios, and perhaps studios will be less inclined to get acquired by Microsoft and other big orgs going forward. Much of the gaming industry outside the indie space has stagnated, making sequels that don't offer much outside of slight increases to graphical fidelity and the odd thematic switch.
- bellowsgulch 3mo agoThe id Tech engine family is perhaps one of the greatest engine families in the industry, and this move tells me there is no technical leadership at Microsoft. We already knew there was no financial leadership. So the question is, what's left? Because there's no gameplay leadership either, and that's the whole fucking point.
- throwaway613746 3mo ago[dead]
- officeplant 3mo agoRip one of modern gamings best performing engines on older hardware (going by my experiences) Can't wait for more terrible UE5 games.
- rwq-askh 3mo agoNaturally, Asha Sharma was in AI before this gig so expect slop games made in India in the future. I never thought I'd want Steve Ballmer back. Things can always get worse.
- Toluhis 3mo agoOf all the firing decisions at Xbox this is the most shortsighted. Do you think or how has competing with the world on another UE work for you? games would run worse , feel worse. You should be encouraging more people to use Idtech.
- ahmadyan 3mo agoAlso Unreal Engine is not free, it cost 5% of revenue, or $3 per game sold (assume $59.99 msrp). for small studio, ok, but for Microsoft's Scale? i don't know. IIRC Doom Dark Age sold 3m? copies, so it would cost $10m in Unreal Engine fees. Doom Engine team likely cost more. Microsoft problem is it is giving away games for free on gamepass, so it sees its engineers as cost center.
- shaewest 3mo agoThe likelihood that MSFT wouldn't have a specific deal for UE is super low. But even in that case, I would imagine that costs for hiring a team to maintain an engine for the minimal games using IDTech's engine (Wolfenstein & Doom), in which they probably plan to reduce development of those games with recent news, makes this a 'not unreasonable' decision.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- cliglot 3mo ago[dead]
- baggachipz 3mo agoIf you find out, let me know. I would only need to do it once and be set.
- postsantum 3mo agoTry to be born the right caste next time
- storus 3mo agoOne could have anticipated XBox getting slowly destroyed by appointing a young clueless outsider as its boss.
- lousken 3mo agoI am sure even AI wouldn't f** up lay offs this badly, this is mind boggling. Can we replace the management with AI please?
- gigatexal 3mo agoWhat does this mean for the future of Doom?!! I hate this. Maybe we should have been sounding such an alarm when Microsoft was buying everyone.
- bossyTeacher 3mo agoWhen people think that tech is a meritocracy and being good means you won't be laid off, show them this.
- trencedamp 3mo agoMichael Maynard's tweet reads like Trump stuff. iD are obviously monumentally important in game history but I disagree with his points that the Doom, doom eternal and doom dark ages are the best fps games ever made. Doom was revolutionary, but are we really going to say the other two are up there? I don't think they'd even be in my top twenty. I get that he's angry and hurt and defending his colleagues but telling me doom dark ages is better than half-life 2 is just picking a fight
- microflash 3mo agoIt's Nokia all over again: Having all ingredients for success and yet stubbornly not succeeding.
- klaussilveira 3mo agoThe only possible good Microsoft could do, in order to salvage their relationship with id software fans, would be to honor Carmack's legacy and release the RAGE engine (id tech 5) as open source. A lot of it was already released in the Doom 3 BFG release, might as well do the whole thing.
- sinoue 3mo agoAsha Sharma is managing the Xbox team like a hotel. Cut costs and boost profits. It works in the short run, but this is surely no way to run innovative game studios. Hopefully spinning these talented folks out will result in gaming innovation outside of Microsoft, because the vision inside Microsoft sure looks bleak.
- wegwerper 3mo agoTime to unionize, Americans!
- AndriyKunitsyn 3mo agoThat's what id Software did in December 2025. 165 of 185 of the studio's staff at the Dallas, TX office unionized with the Communications Workers of America (CWA).
- jnwatson 3mo agoI'm generally laissez-faire about corporate layoffs. Corporation should have the freedom to organize how they want. Still, this sticks in my craw. Microsoft didn't just buy a game studio. They bought a fleet of studios, a non trivial segment of the entire video game market. And they did almost nothing with them, and then they just light the goodwill on fire. It isn't just the IP. It is the brand, the organizational work, the history. Just vaporized. The least they could have done is sell the studios mostly intact.
- redml 3mo agoI'm probably not alone but I didn't buy any of the doom or quake games for the storytelling or IP, I bought it for the engine. They were foremost a game engine company. Switching to UE5 now makes it compete on the same level as other UE5 games, and there's a lot of those already. Kiss of death for the company if you ask me.
- CyanLite2 3mo agoAll those devs need to get together and form their own studio, and then sell it back to Microsoft for $83 billion. Oh wait...
- leecommamichael 3mo agoThere are a lot of people blaming the iD for having their own tech. Programming is partly an artistic endeavor. Games programming can especially be so, part of the market is based in novelty, and doing new things sometimes requires new/different capabilities.
- ThatMedicIsASpy 3mo agoI can only blame them for moving to RT only with their new Doom when they had insane performance on their previous games. Many toasters could easily hit 60fps in high settings.
- ForgotMyUUID 3mo agoIDDQD to you all
- siberianbot 3mo agoIMHO, this move should lead to opening the source code of idTech. Such engine should be preserved any way.
- insane_dreamer 3mo agoSo I guess $27B in _profit_ in Q1 alone this year isn't enough for MSFT. Need to fire 3000 people to make ends meet. Tough.
- asdaqopqkq 3mo agomakes zero sense, that's some top tier human capital
- maximilianburke 3mo agoI am absolutely gutted. I remember reading the id Software .plan updates as they were made. I was a bit too young to follow Quake development, but the insiders view of Quake 2 and Quake 3 Arena was incredible to see happen. And, yeah, I know that it was the id Tech team that was affected and not all of id Software, but it was the engine development that got me hooked.
- asdaqopqkq 3mo agoI hope they don't join the games industrty again but rather use their engineering skills for aerospace or robotics etc
- expedition32 3mo agoToo much boomer nostalgia about iD. I get it I am old too but people need to understand that the world moves on. The glory days of iD are long, long gone and Microsoft needs to start making some goddamn money on Xbox. And iD hasn't been pulling their weight.
- flohofwoe 3mo agoI wonder how much a blow this will be for Vulkan on Windows. idTech was always known for strongly preferring the Khronos 3D APIs over Direct3D and the fewer native Vulkan games are released on Windows the less pressure there is on the GPU vendors to fix and optimize their Windows Vulkan drivers.
- GreenWatermelon 3mo agoWindows is pretty much speed running into gaming irrelevance. Valve is gaining momentum as days pass and Microsoft doesn't care enough.
- flohofwoe 3mo agoWindows as a platform might become irrelevant, but the convenience and robustness of the Win32+D3D API combo for game development simply has no equal on Linux (except Proton of course). I trust Valve and the Proton team to have a fallback plan though. The desktop Linux community (if it can be called that) is too fragmented to come up with a solution. In this case more centralization (of development efforts) would be a good thing. But I don't see native Linux ports taking off for at least the next decade. Proton is just too good for that to happen ;)
- eur0pa 3mo agoOutrageous and insulting.
- roody15 3mo agoThis is a mistake. The last 2 doom games sold quite well and have a unique look and feel that is associated with idtech. This could backfire on Microsoft big time.
- aristofun 3mo agoI’m happy every time takented people leave bad company. Now they’re are free to create their own thing or join someone not as rotten as ms. To be fair it looks like a rational decision from ms perspective. If being #1 in game engines is not a priority.
- elAhmo 3mo agoIt is quite inevitable that things like this happen whenever a big, soulless corporation ends up buying people who unique set of skills and talent. Similar thing is happening in other areas of the industry, where companies like Vercel, Anthropic, OpenAI just keep buying companies and it is really hard to find a case where things turned out well.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]