id Software has broken its silence on the layoffs that hit the studio this week, thanking fans for their support and pushing back on the idea that the team has been hollowed out. In a statement shared on social media, the DOOM developer acknowledged the studio was impacted but said the changes were spread across teams, adding that it still has the crew it needs to build the games and technology it’s known for.
The statement’s most notable claim is that the team today is about the same size it was when making DOOM (2016), the game that brought the franchise back and kicked off its modern era. id also said it has always operated as a flat studio where everyone is a maker, a philosophy it intends to keep, and that its focus right now is on supporting each other and the team members who were let go. The studio closed by saying it will keep building the games and tech that have defined it for the past 35 years, and that it looks forward to seeing everyone at QuakeCon this August.
The statement arrives at the end of a brutal week for the studio. As I covered in my review of DOOM: The Dark Ages | Revelations, Microsoft kicked off the biggest restructuring in XBOX history one day before the DLC launched, cutting 3,200 roles across the division, with reports and WARN filings indicating roughly half of id, around 136 people, lost their jobs. That’s all worth keeping in mind when reading the statement, since both things can be true at once: the studio grew considerably to ship DOOM: The Dark Ages, the biggest launch in id’s history, and losing half of that team brings it back to roughly its 2016 headcount.
I said in my review that I’m genuinely saddened and frustrated by what happened to this team, and that the people who made Revelations deserved better, and a semi-reassuring statement doesn’t change that. Still, if the goal was to signal that id can keep being id, pointing to the DOOM 2016 team size is about the best card the studio could play.
