id Software Got Butchered

You've probably heard the news already, but this needs to be talked about. Microsoft has announced heavy layoffs in the video game branch earlier this week: 1600 people got fired immediately and 1600 are to leave later. They've tried to make it sound reasonable by talking about trimming down management, which is usually a good thing, but these changes also hit where it hurts.

One developer was hit particularly hard: id Software, the studio behind classics like Doom, Wolfenstein and Quake. An article from Kotaku shares insights into the extent of the cuts: 136 of 185 employees got fired, more than two thirds of the staff. Entire teams got eradicated, including the team responsible for their in-house engine, id Tech. This happened right after the launch of DOOM: Revelation, an expansion for DOOM: The Dark Ages, leaving the studio now crippled.

One of the affected people is Adam "SyncError" Pyle, who has been keeping their free-to-play multiplayer shooter Quake Champions alive for the last couple of years, with new maps, weapon skins, features, and lots of fixes. On his own admission, he did a lot of that in his free time, not because he had to, but because he deeply cared about the game and the franchise. He worked together closely with the community, who tested upcoming features and gave feedback.

If you have someone as passionate and talented as Adam Pyle working for your company, you don't let such people go. But Bethesda under ZeniMax Media under Microsoft apparently doesn't care about such talent – they only care about margin. And classic gaming franchises like Doom and Quake seemingly don't create enough of that these days, where it looks like their fate is sealed, unless Bethesda is planning to outsource them to other studios...

Of course, these aren't the first major layoffs in the industry in the recent years. There's a whole Wikipedia article about the topic, which lists pretty much every major publisher except one: Nintendo. The worst you hear about them lately is that they are killing one of their few mobile games...

I wouldn't even be surprised if some of the people who have worked for id Software now found their way to Retro Studios, helping out with the development of Metroid Prime 5. Both are located in Texas, in Richardson and Austin to be exact, which aren't that far from each other...

And just like Retro Studios spawned from Iguana Entertainment back in the day (the creators of the classic Turok games for the Nintendo 64), all this talent from id Software may open their own studio. If that happens, then that new studio will certainly have my interest, unlike Microsoft going forward.