Workers laid off from id Software have begun speaking out about the scale of the cuts, which have hollowed out one of the most storied studios in gaming. Texas Workforce Commission filings confirmed 136 job losses at the Doom developer, comprising 96 on-site staff at its Richardson office and a further 40 remote workers who reported to it. That figure sits within a broader ZeniMax cull of 158 roles across Texas, with the remaining 22 falling at Bethesda Game Studios' Austin office. Given that id reportedly employed around 185 people, the cuts amount to well over half the studio.
"I Was Blindsided by It"
Dean Takahashi collected accounts from affected employees, all speaking anonymously. One described the cuts bluntly as a bloodbath, saying, "I was blindsided by it. The scale of it." Another, who had just finished work on the DLC for Doom: The Dark Ages, spoke to the exhaustion compounding the shock. "It's been really nerve-wracking, and I am completely burned out because we were just finishing the DLC. We thought we might get impacted, but not to this scale," they said.
The timing has drawn particular anger. The Revelations expansion for Doom: The Dark Ages launched the day after the layoffs landed, with current staff publicly stating that developers put in months of unpaid overtime to finish it. Others reported that entire specialist disciplines were wiped out, including everyone with the Houdini expertise underpinning the game's procedural modelling work, and that the engine team behind the celebrated idTech technology has been reduced to a skeleton.
Despite it all, one departing employee spoke with evident pride. "We did genre-defining titles that we rebooted after it was effectively considered dead. I'm proud of what we did. I'm proud of the studio. I'm proud of the people that are there still and the people who aren't."
The Games That Never Got Made
Perhaps the most striking element of the report is what id had been developing before the axe fell, because it paints a picture of a studio brimming with ideas rather than one running dry. The headline concept was an original IP codenamed Fury, pitched by Doom game director and studio co-director Hugo Martin. It blended sci-fi, noir, and Louisiana and Chicago gangster influences into a modern, cyberpunk-inflected world, built around a mechanic called Gun Fu that fused gunplay with martial arts, aiming for something akin to a John Wick film. It was never formally greenlit.
Fury wasn't alone. The studio had also explored a new Perfect Dark game, notable given Microsoft recently shuttered The Initiative, which had spent years on a Perfect Dark reboot, plus a Western-flavoured robot survival concept codenamed Ironwood with shades of Westworld. On the Doom front, proposals included multiplayer and co-op modes, further DLC, and bringing back classic weapons from Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal.
A Studio Judged by a Yardstick It Didn't Know
The most damning thread in the reporting is the suggestion that id may never have understood what Microsoft actually wanted from it. One former studio head was reportedly unclear whether Xbox's goal was Game Pass subscribers, engagement hours, standalone sales, revenue, profit, or simply prestigious technology showcases. That ambiguity matters enormously, because had the studio known raw revenue and profit were the target, it might have leaned into live-service, multiplayer, or repeatable content rather than continuing to craft lean single-player Doom campaigns every few years. Instead, id appears to have been measured against a business model it wasn't explicitly building toward, and was left especially exposed by sitting between major projects when the cuts arrived.
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