Though news of the Xbox layoffs is nothing new by now, we’re starting to receive official numbers from various studios under Microsoft’s umbrella, with some of them having to let go of over a hundred people from key positions, the consequences of which could be quite dire indeed.
And thus, as Game Developer’s update from today outlines, we’ve learned that id Software laid off 136 people in total, including key programmers and coders. This includes 96 on-site staff and 40 remote developers at that studio’s office in Richardson, Texas. These layoffs were a part of an ongoing restructuring effort currently underway at Xbox and affecting basically every single studio and publisher owned by Microsoft.
ZeniMax Media’s subsidiaries, including Bethesda, Obsidian, and id Software, are being reorganized to focus on key franchises, such as The Elder Scrolls and Fallout.
What the Doom developer will look like after these efforts is hard to predict, as these numbers account for about half of the entire studio. One of its most prominent programmers, Michael Maynard, went off on Xbox and Microsoft yesterday and called them out for relegating id Software, a “pioneer” in video games, to a “reorganization of assets.”
Losing those programmers means id Tech will probably have a hard time being maintained and/or updated, which would be a crying shame because it is probably one of the most optimized, stable, and good-looking first-person game engines out there. If we were to lose this in-house masterpiece to Unreal Engine, which is highly likely in today’s environment, that’d be a really, really sad day for the gaming industry.
But time is our best friend and enemy, and we shall know the fate of these “restructured” studios soon.
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