The Revelations DLC for DOOM: The Dark Ages shipped in July. The same week, Microsoft dropped its sweeping 3,200-person layoff announcement that tore through nearly every Xbox studio, including id Software. For at least one developer on the Revelations team, those two events landed almost simultaneously.
The human cost behind a shipped expansion
Producer Andrew Willis was among those laid off after the expansion released. He described the final push to ship Revelations as something the team will not forget quickly. For roughly two months leading up to launch, Willis said the team was working at minimum 12 hours a day. He personally logged 17-hour days on multiple occasions.
"It was brutal, and the majority of the game got made in three or four months," Willis said. "There were days where I didn't see my son the whole day; multiple days of that that I sacrificed to get this out the door at the level of quality."
He was clear that the crunch was not officially mandated by id Software. The pressure came from the workload itself. "You get loaded up with 60 hours of work in a week, and what do you do?" Willis explained. The alternative, shipping something barely passable, was not something the team was willing to put their names on. Willis called it "pseudo-induced crunch": the kind that does not appear in a policy document but happens anyway because the work demands it.
Some team members with combined Hollywood and game development careers spanning 30 years reportedly said Revelations represented the worst crunch they had ever experienced.
Laid off the day before it shipped
The timing made an already difficult situation feel surreal. Willis described the experience of pouring months of his life into a project only to be let go as it crossed the finish line.
"You spend so much of your energy and hours of your life, and sacrifice a bunch of things, to get something out the door, and then they lay you off the day before," Willis said. "It's such a wild feeling."
Id Software was hit especially hard in Microsoft's July cuts. The studio reportedly lost more than half its staff, including senior engineers responsible for the id Tech engine and other core disciplines. Co-studio director Hugo Martin pushed back on the narrative that id was gutted, noting the remaining team is roughly the size of the group that shipped Doom (2016). But id's lead services provider Chris Hayes, who stayed on after the cuts, has publicly stated it is "impossible" to make AAA games at the scale of Doom 2016 with the current headcount.
What this means for the people who made it
The Revelations DLC itself landed as an expansion-sized release. Players who picked it up got a substantial chunk of content, including the divisive new Chain Spear weapon that has split the community almost down the middle since launch. If you're still working through it, the Revelations DLC complete walkthrough covers every chapter and the Chain Spear bug fix in detail.
Here's the thing: the crunch conversation in game development has been ongoing for years, but Willis's account puts a specific, personal face on a problem that often gets discussed in the abstract. Sixty-hour workweeks are not a badge of honor. They are a structural failure that falls hardest on the people least able to refuse.
With id Software's future now genuinely uncertain and the developers who shipped Revelations scattered by layoffs, the questions around what the studio builds next are not just about games. They are about whether the people who remain can sustain the workload without repeating the same cycle. For anyone tracking what comes next from id, the DOOM: The Dark Ages guides hub will be updated as new information on the studio's direction surfaces.
