id Software Boss Says Studio Is Fine After Losing Half Its Staff

id Software co-director Marty Stratton says the studio is doing great after about half of it left in the Xbox cuts. Longtime programmer Chris Hays says a triple-A game like the earlier ones is impossible with half the people.

A programmer calls it impossible

Chris Hays has worked at id for a long time and was not among those laid off. Soon after the cuts he said that making a triple-A game like the ones id made before is hard with half the people. "And by hard I mean impossible," he added.

Triple-A is the industry label for big-budget, large-team releases. Hays also claimed that entire departments and disciplines are gone.

The directors push back

Co-studio director Marty Stratton was asked at a recent event how the developer is faring. He told journalists, as reported by IGN: "We're doing great."

He did not wave the layoffs away. About half of the studio left, he said, and everybody knows it. But he described a deliberate effort to keep id viable across game development and its technology department.

Hugo Martin, the other co-head, had made a similar case before. He pushed back on the narrative that the studio had been nerfed into the ground and gutted. The remaining team, he said, matches the size id had when it made Doom 2016, and id Tech is very much alive and well.

Stratton has not responded to Hays's comments directly.

Where the cuts landed

Around 136 employees reportedly lost their jobs at id during the business "reset" run by Xbox CEO Asha Sharma. The first wave came in July and included developers on id Tech. That is the engine, the core software, behind all of the studio's games. It has a reputation for running well and producing good-looking games on modest hardware.

After July, many people inside and outside the studio said the id Tech team had been gutted. The wider reset is set to remove 3,200 jobs across Microsoft's gaming division, and many of those cuts have not happened yet.

MachineGames and what comes next

Stratton said id is now working more closely than ever with MachineGames. The Swedish studio made the modern Wolfenstein games and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. He called both teams talented, with strong engineers, and said the technology work began earlier this year, before the layoffs. He said both teams are very bullish on what lies ahead.

Id's next project is not known. MachineGames recently said it is not done with Wolfenstein, so a sequel to 2017's The New Colossus may be in the works.

Our View

The two sides do not really contest the headcount. They disagree on whether the people who remain are enough. Only a finished game can settle that, and id has not named its next one. The joint technology work with MachineGames, which started before the cuts, may hint at where the studio is heading.

Source: Eurogamer