'We’re Doing Great' After Losing Half the Studio: How DOOM Leadership Is Leaning on MachineGames to Keep id Software Alive
Losing roughly half of your workforce overnight and declaring a few weeks later that everything is running smoothly is a tough sell, even in Texas. After Microsoft Gaming's sweeping summer restructuring gutted nearly a hundred roles at id Software in early July, leadership at the legendary shooter studio is working overtime to project stability. Speaking to the press this week about the fallout from those historic cuts, studio co-director Marty Stratton brushed off fears of a collapse while detailing a deeper engineering alliance with Swedish sister studio MachineGames.
'We’re Doing Great': Marty Stratton and Hugo Martin Defend a Downsized Studio
The timing of the July layoffs left a bitter taste across the industry. Just twenty-four hours before id Software shipped Revelations, the major story expansion for DOOM: The Dark Ages on July 7, roughly half of the studio's staff were informed their roles had been eliminated. Across the shooter landscape, those summer cuts forced veteran teams to scramble for survival, much like how DOOM co-creator John Romero rescued his next shooter with a new publisher after losing his own funding. Despite the upheaval in Richardson, Stratton insists the remaining team was carefully structured to survive the blow.
"We're doing great. Not to handwave the layoffs away... everybody knows we had about half of our studio exit as part of that. But there was a very deliberate effort to make sure that we were incredibly viable coming out of that across everything we do, across game development and technology department."
Marty Stratton, Studio Co-Director at id Software
Stratton's upbeat assessment echoes earlier comments from DOOM: The Dark Ages creative director Hugo Martin during a community livestream alongside community lead Joshua Boyle. Pushing back against reports that id Software had been "gutted" or "nerfed into the ground" down to fifty employees, Martin argued that the studio's current headcount matches its size when it shipped the acclaimed 2016 DOOM reboot, adding that "what matters the most is that the games are good."
Laid-Off Veterans Push Back Against the AAA Math
Among the developers who lost their jobs in the purge, management's rosy comparisons to 2016 ring hollow. Several departing seniors pointed out that entire support and infrastructure disciplines were wiped out, erasing decades of institutional knowledge in a single afternoon. Former lead services programmer Chris Hays, who was laid off after twelve years at id Software, spoke candidly on the Well Played podcast in August about the reality of building modern blockbusters with a skeleton crew.
"It is hard to make a game that is AAA that's like we've done before with half the people. And by hard I mean impossible. We're not the same id. We're half the same id... id was the people. What made us special was the people and the relationships we have."
Chris Hays, Former Lead Services Programmer at id Software
Hays also accused corporate leadership at Microsoft and Xbox of fundamentally failing to understand the craft of game development. With roughly a quarter of Xbox's broader corporate reset still pending for November and January alongside Microsoft's voluntary buyout offers across 60,000 employees, anxiety across ZeniMax studios remains high.
Pooling Engineering Muscle With MachineGames to Protect id Tech
The biggest question mark hanging over id Software is the long-term future of id Tech, the proprietary engine powering its ultra-fast first-person shooters. Maintaining a cutting-edge internal engine alongside full AAA game production is a massive burden for a studio half its former size. To bridge the engineering gap between Texas and its Frankfurt tech hub, Stratton confirmed that id Software is now pooling its technical pipeline more closely than ever with MachineGames, which uses a customized fork of id Tech for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle and its unannounced Wolfenstein 3 project.
"We're working more closely with MachineGames than ever. We've always had a very close partnership with them, but I think we're at a point with technology development that both teams are incredibly talented and have incredibly talented engineers and we're really on an amazing path that had started pre-layoffs. We'd kicked this off earlier this year. We're really excited about that. We're both really really bullish on what we have ahead."
Marty Stratton, Studio Co-Director at id Software
My Take: Corporate Optimism Cannot Replace Institutional Memory
I get that a studio boss cannot walk into a press room and announce that his team is on life support. Still, hearing Marty Stratton open with "we're doing great" after half of his colleagues were shown the door twenty-four hours before the launch of Revelations is peak 2026 corporate PR. Comparing today's headcount to the team that built DOOM (2016) ten years ago ignores just how much heavier modern AAA production and ray-traced id Tech 8 engineering have become. Sharing engine responsibilities with MachineGames across Texas, Frankfurt, and Uppsala is a smart survival play to keep both DOOM and Wolfenstein moving forward, but you do not lose a hundred veteran developers without feeling the scars on your next release.
SEO consultant for over 20 years and digital entrepreneur, Charles "Grimtag" is the founder of Pro-Gamer.gg, Retrocharting.com, and Gamescharting.com. A competitive gamer, streamer, and retro game collector, he has worked in the video game industry for over 15 years, notably as a consultant for leading game price comparison platforms. Passionate about real-time performance data and gaming technology, he analyzes competitive esports, gaming hardware benchmarks, and creator workflows on Pro-Gamer.gg with an authentic player perspective.
