Following recent statements by id Software co-director Hugo Martin about how the studio hasn’t been “nerfed and gutted” following Xbox’s mass layoffs, multiple anonymous developers have expressed skepticism. According to Game Developer, current and former employees of the studio have spoken about how they disagree with Martin on the subject.
“I don’t agree with Hugo’s statement, and many who were laid off were upset by those comments and saw it as viewing their contributions as insignificant to the success of our games,” said one. “I’ve been a gamer my whole life. If you cut a stat in half, everyone would call that nerfed. In truth, the DOOM team is half here, half thrown away.”
They also went on to note that the fact that the current team size at id Software is similar to its size during the development of DOOM (2016) shouldn’t really be celebrated. Development of the game has been described as “brutal”, since it went through several iterations over the course of seven years and “an absurd amount of crunch”.
“It’s also of note that DOOM (2016) development was brutal. With the infamous DOOM 4 reboot included, it took about seven years and an absurd amount of crunch to finish. The icing on the cake is that there were several key individuals who worked an unsafe number of hours to make that happen who were also part of the layoffs.”
A former employee brought up the fact that id Software suffered from “massive turnover and exodus” between 2010 and 2011, which in turn left the studio in an “awful spot”. To finally ship the game, the studio had to ramp up hiring in 2013-2014, which included the hiring of Crytek’s CryEngine team.
“Hiring ramped up tremendously around 2013-2014 for the final push—or the studio was going to go under,” they added. “On top of the internal hiring spree (which involved a small miracle of picking up Crytek’s engine team almost wholesale), we also contracted out a support studio of 21 people (Escalation Studios, which was purchased and turned into Bethesda Dallas) and Certain Affinity, which consisted of around 140 developers at the time.”
In his statement from last week, Martin noted that id Software still had 50 workers, and offered assurances that id Tech is “very much alive” thanks to its teams existing in Frankfurt and MachineGames.
“You have to understand we have id Tech engineers both in Frankfurt and at MachineGames – we collaborate quite a bit. So id Tech is there, the DOOM team is here, and we’re excited to share with you guys more of what we’re working on in the future when it is appropriate and approved.”
Layoffs affecting id Software are said to have been quite rough, with around 50 percent of its workforce being cut. The move was part of larger layoffs across Xbox that affected roughly 1,600 jobs. CEO Asha Sharma has confirmed that more layoffs are on the way, with 1,600 more cuts slated to happen before the end of the current fiscal year.
