Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

I think we'll see stuff like this continue to happen over time. As a game company, having your own engine means that you have to be able to cultivate internal expertise in your tooling. Your employees will know this and could do bad things like ask for more money because they know that replacing them would significantly hurt productivity. Meanwhile, laying off your whole engine team and switching to UE5 means that you can get access to tons of low-wage contractors who know UE5. You can hire a bunch of them when you start a game project and then lay them all off when it's finished, and rinse and repeat as necessary. It lets you treat your employees as a replaceable commodity that can be scaled up and down as it makes monetary sense rather than a cohesive team of skilled artisans.

It’s painful to watch this because the recipe for success at Microsoft is so obvious. They’ve just been fumbling the ball for so many years that it’s catching up to them.

And the thing is they’re not unprofitable. Gutting their studios and technology development isn’t going to help growth, it’s going to contract the business.

There's no real evidence in here that the IDTech team or the "coders" were specifically let go. I'm not saying it didn't happen but the article is just raging at the idea of it happening without presenting any evidence of it.

I can't help but think the industry will be better off in a few years after this Xbox "restructure." That's a lot of knowledge and talent that's no longer stuck in 14 layers of middle management hell.

Microsoft, one the world's greatest monopolists, bequeaths a game engine monopoly unto Epic Games, in one the biggest corporate blunders of all time.

If they were smarter about this, they would commoditize their compliment and open source the Doom The Dark Ages engine just like John Carmack did with the Quake 3 engine.

It's sad to watch corporate leadership try to fix problems with tactics that will only make them worse. MS bought successful studios who were successful precisely because their of unique technical and design culture. Now they plan to homogenise them into a content-creation blob that will churn out entries for existing franchises, using the same tools and approaches as the rest of the industry. Anything that was special or unique about those studios and their games will be lost, and the result will be a downward spiral of mediocrity that will cause players to lose interest even further.

I'm going to choose to look at this in a positive light. In the long term this talent will feed into more indie games and studios, and perhaps studios will be less inclined to get acquired by Microsoft and other big orgs going forward.

Much of the gaming industry outside the indie space has stagnated, making sequels that don't offer much outside of slight increases to graphical fidelity and the odd thematic switch.

Microsoft EEE at its best: gobble up all game studios and then kill them.

Microsoft needs to be split, it should been split years ago, but now more than ever.

RIP to the end of an era.

Was IdTech used outside of Id? Or was it just a Doom series thing as of recently?

Appears hugged: https://archive.ph/EIiLP

Rip one of modern gamings best performing engines on older hardware (going by my experiences)

Can't wait for more terrible UE5 games.

Naturally, Asha Sharma was in AI before this gig so expect slop games made in India in the future.

I never thought I'd want Steve Ballmer back. Things can always get worse.

Looks like Microsoft is desperate for more cash to burn on AI and making drastic decisions like this.

Sure the Xbox division wasn't doing amazing but still had $24B of revenue in 2025. For reference PlayStation made $30B that same year.

I have a friend who works at Ubisoft. Even 10+ years ago, she clearly saw the writing on the wall - the massive developer/publisher consolidation was going terribly:

- Every studio uses their own custom set of tools and development practices. The economies of scale of merging studios together just doesn't really exist.

- The functional difference between most engines for consumers at this point is largely meaningless. There are no order of magnitude gains like there used to be. Most of the engineering is on the cloud services architecture or anti-cheat.

- The median "developer" at a game studio is not actually a very technical person. They mostly just spend their days inputting content and assets with the available tools.

- The value of a AAA game is not how innovative the gameplay is but how much content they were able to stuff into the game.

- Nobody cares about "exclusives" anymore when 90% of AAAs have interchangeable gameplay with other AAAs.

- The cost to start a new studio is negligible compared to the cost of acquiring existing IP.

This doesn't seem to be correct. Its amazing how one tweet can go so broad even when its not accurate. Tiago Sousa, Billy Khan, Phillip Hammer, Dominik Lazarek all seem like they are still at Id

Interestingly, Id was led by John Carmack, who was also a big fan of VR. And Microsoft killed the AR/VR/MR teams a year ago.

So, I'm guessing internally there were some leadership hopes that IdTech would help support IVAS and related professional AR systems and when those failed to be adopted at scale, IdTech lost a key sponsor. I'm guessing it's been a rough year of internal advocacy since.

> Yet today, Microsoft/XBOX decided half the team was deemed USELESS and needed to be let go

I feel that this is an incredibly unfair and demeaning take both towards Microsoft and towards the people being fired. As I see it, getting fired is just like being dumped by a romantic partner. It typically says very little about your value as an individual, and almost everything about their current situation and how the relationship with you fits into their future plans and the other opportunities available to them.

Game devs have been heavily unionizing lately, including Blizzard and WotC. I wonder how long long it takes before we have a union game dev studio basically mutiny and completely disregard the instructions of the corporate suits, and force the choice of either shuttering the studio completely or caving to the workers.

No more DOOM games (((

Either John or John should buy back the Id Software name

Don’t sell you company to Microsoft then

This hurts, in a very specific way. Those coders are legendary wizards of the craft, understanding engine design and systems architecture in a way nobody else in the industry does. This is a team that could get 200fps+ in their games with RT on and no dynamic reconstruction or upscaling to be had, at a time when everyone else mandated such shortcuts to have even 30-45fps at a similar resolution. They did all this while also working closely with the actual game designers, to make sure the tech was usable instead of obfuscatory or hindering to production.

The fact Microsoft just fired them all, at a time when their remaining studios desperately need help with their aging, shitty engines? I can’t think of a better indicator that they haven’t a fucking clue about what they’re doing, here.

Remember when Satya Nadella and Bobby Kotick got up in court and told everyone how all these giant Xbox mergers would be good for the consumer and went after Lina Khan for suggesting that maybe that wasn't the case?

Who woulda thunk they were full of crap...? (besides everyone who didn't have a financial stake in the deal)

Next: Blizzard

On the same day they release the new Dark Ages DLC. The game industry continues to be brutal.

why wouldn't they just sell it?

I'm deeply opposed to game distribution companies (console makers) being allowed to acquire game studios.

In the same way that theaters and streaming services shouldn't be allowed to do acquisitions.

Disney owning whatever ridiculous proportion of media by buying everything serves nobody's best interest.

Fast forward a few years “where did all our institutional knowledge about performance and rendering go??”

So utterly predictable it’s infuriating

Really a sad day. DOOM was fantastic.

They are moving most of their development to India, where it's pretty easy to find bottom-dollar UE5 dev shops.

Related:

Resetting Xbox

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48804993

Looking at Asha Sharma's track record of having no experience in anything related to gaming, don't color me surprised when in 6 months the foisted narrative will be 'well, do we even need an Xbox?'

q3dm17 for life.

Wow, that tweet claiming the Doom series is the best first person action game in the entire industry is crazy. That dev has to be completely disconnected from the rest of the game industry or delusional. No stats support that claim at all. Not player count, not sales, not reviews, nothing. The first Doom was certainly industry defining, but it and its sequels have never been considered the best by anyone except apparently this dev. If they were the best, they probably wouldn't be getting laid off right now.

Unreal Engine has become a commodity, and it is easier to recruit people with experience - even CD Projekt Red gave up.

The only major studios doing their own thing is Rockstar and Bethesda.

I would not include Cloud Imperium here because they are forever in a beta state with no clear ship date in the future for their two games.

Too bad they didn't double down and sell the Id Tech Engine and be a competitor to UE. Instead of folding.

Some more earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48810496

im not a gamer but looking at this purely from the headlines and reactions :

- games like other forms of media have become mixed with political messagings that pre-dominantly hetrosexual male demographic rejected understandably

- games have become far too expensive and poor lasting. i remember games like unreal tournament, quake arena, counter strike 1.3, starcraft had very lasting user base long after their release, now it seems like game companies shut down multiplayer and stop community mods

So you make a product that your target audience doesn't want and raised the prices and lot of smaller studios and indie developers are filling that gap that large studios have self sabotaged by associating with (ex. Sweet Baby, GaymerX, Black Girl Gamers) that have led to flagship titles to complete ruin (ex. Concord)

The id Tech engine family is perhaps one of the greatest engine families in the industry, and this move tells me there is no technical leadership at Microsoft. We already knew there was no financial leadership.

So the question is, what's left? Because there's no gameplay leadership either, and that's the whole fucking point.

Perhaps also a bit of ageism. Always hard to prove. Often implicit.

$2.93 trillion market cap....layoffs

Bizarre incentives we have created

I was fired by microsoft last year, Satya said the layoff was not due to performance reasons and he refused to elaborate what it was. In the job market I had to explain at every interview why I was laid off. People still ask me why I left MS to work at my current less prestigious company when the learn I used to work there and I have to sheepishly repeat the lie I have memorised to make them go away.

Even when I was at MS I saw a culture of always being in firing and hiring mode. They fired people who were perfectly good at their jobs and hired people who needed to be trained and needed higher salaries.

Sorry Satya. I just can't trust MS with my career anymore and I dissuade more people from going there everyday. ¯\(ツ)/¯

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The LinkedIn screenshot there is pathetic.

"I made a good game in 2016. I was paid for that; it was literally my job. Ten years later, they let me go." Oh no, boo hoo.

Also, the classic "everything is good when they pay me; when they stop paying me, they're evil." Are they not aware of how vile that makes them look?

There's an anecdote about Stalin (or someone else, maybe it's made up) where he plucks a chicken's feathers, and the thing is convulsing in pain. Then he offers it a handful of corn, and it starts eating from his hand.

A man should strive to be better than an animal.

What the fuck

I don't really understand. Id Software is owned by Microsoft? Why Microsoft can laying off employees of Id Software?