The timing could not be more uncomfortable. Doom: The Dark Ages Revelations, the expansion to one of the most technically accomplished shooters in years, is launching this week. At the same time, the studio that built the engine powering it has reportedly been gutted.
Microsoft's latest round of layoffs, which the company announced would affect 3,200 employees and result in five studio closures, has hit id Software with particular severity. Reports from people familiar with the situation suggest roughly 50% of the studio's workforce has been let go. That number alone would be alarming. The specifics make it worse.
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What the cuts actually look like inside id Software
3D Realms founder Scott Miller has shared that, based on information from people close to the situation, most or all of id Software's coders have been made redundant. Separately, former Bethesda Game Studios project lead Jeff Gardiner has stated he's heard that 85 developers have lost their jobs at id. Two independent accounts, pointing in the same direction.
That's not a restructuring. That's a near-complete dismantling of the technical team behind one of the most capable proprietary engines in the industry.
Why id Tech 8 losing its coders matters beyond one studio
Here's the thing: id Tech has been setting benchmarks for three decades. The engine allowed Doom to run at a blistering pace on the original Nintendo Switch without gutting the visuals. It's the same foundation that powers the hardware-accelerated ray-traced global illumination in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, a game that somehow scales all the way down to Nintendo Switch 2. Doom: The Dark Ages pushed it further still, becoming the first in the series to require hardware ray tracing while still maintaining the high framerates the gameplay demands.
That kind of scalability, from a handheld port to a demanding PC experience, doesn't happen by accident. It's the result of years of accumulated engineering knowledge, the exact kind that walks out the door when you cut your coding team.
The pattern Microsoft keeps repeating
This isn't the first time a promising proprietary engine has been sidelined under Microsoft's watch. 343 Industries built the Slipspace Engine specifically for Halo Infinite, only for Halo Studios to announce a shift to Unreal Engine for the next entry in the franchise. The question now is whether id Tech follows the same path.
MachineGames, currently reported to be developing a third Wolfenstein game, may well be doing so on the last version of id Tech that receives serious development. If the coders are gone, who iterates on it next? The key here is that proprietary engines require constant investment, not just to maintain but to stay competitive. Without that investment, studios either stagnate or migrate.
For context on how demanding modern engines can be to optimize even for players, check out our best PC settings guide for Directive 8020, a title built on Unreal Engine 5 that requires careful tuning to hit stable framerates. That complexity is exactly what id Tech was engineered to avoid through its own bespoke solutions.
The broader trend across the industry is already moving toward Unreal Engine consolidation. CD Projekt Red made the switch. Smaller studios never had the resources to maintain their own tech in the first place. What made id Software different was that it had the talent and the history to keep pushing proprietary tech forward. Past tense is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
What's left in Microsoft's technical arsenal
After these cuts, Microsoft's remaining proprietary engine investments are narrowing fast. ForzaTech still powers the Forza Horizon series and the upcoming Fable. The Creation Engine underpins Starfield, Fallout, and The Elder Scrolls. id Tech's future is now a question mark.
With Project Helix reportedly targeting a 2027 launch, Microsoft needs compelling technical reasons for players to engage with its ecosystem. Retreating from the engine work that produced some of the most visually demanding and technically impressive games of the past decade sends the opposite message.
For players who want to get the most out of games still running on id Tech's lineage today, our ROG Xbox Ally X settings guide for ChainStaff covers how to squeeze the best performance out of handheld hardware. It's a reminder of just how much work goes into making these engines run well across wildly different devices.
The full picture of the id Software layoffs is still emerging as former employees continue to share details. Watch for more clarity in the coming days as the scope of the cuts becomes harder to obscure. For the latest coverage across every major studio affected by the Xbox restructuring, the gaming guides and news hub has ongoing coverage as the story develops.
