UPDATE: Things may be worse than was originally thought at id Software. A new report from gamedeveloper.com has emerged, with the website stating that they requested an official WARN (Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification) report from Texas. That document states 96 of redundancies are being made at the office of id Software in Richardson, Texas. Another 40 remote workers reporting to that office have also be let go, bringing the total to 136.
As best we know, the company had roughly 185 employees at the end of last year. If all these numbers are accurate, id Software has been decimated.
ORIGINAL STORY: We’re just one day out from Xbox’s big “reset” which saw 1,600 people lose their jobs with another 1,600 layoffs planned for the coming fiscal year. It also saw Compulsion Games and Double Fine returning to being independent studios, and Undead Labs and Ninja Theory being sold to currently unknown buyers. More details are slowly trickling in, amongst them is id Software may have been gutted.
Former Bethesda Game Studios project lead Jeff Gardiner posted on social media saying: “Just heard 95 at id.”
This is important because in December of 2025 during id Software becoming unionised we learned the company was sitting at around 185 employees. If what Gardiner heard is accurate, that’s very close to half of the company being laid off.
Scott Miller, co-founder of Apogee/3D Realms, claims he heard that “a majority” of id Software was being laid off, including “most (if not all) coders.”
Scott’s claims are potentially devastating. Nobody has confirmed that id Tech itself has been targeted. But when people hear that “most” of id’s coders may be gone, the obvious fear is not just fewer people scripting demon arenas. It is the potential loss of the people who understand the machinery underneath Doom, the legendary id Tech engine that is widely regarded as one of the greatest FPS engines ever.
This new contrasts against an update from Bloomberg journalist Jason Schreier who said on Bluesky that “Zenimax will be impacted significantly but will NOT be reduced to only Fallout and The Elder Scrolls,” and that “The publisher will also still work on Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake.”
But with such drastic cuts, what kind of future does Doom have? Doom: The Dark Ages seemed to have much softer performance than the previous two entries, after all.
One theory floating around is that Xbox is ditching the id Tech engine entirely and will move future games to Unreal Engine, hence cutting down on coders. Other people are concerned they might become some sort of support studio, although that wouldn’t fit in with Schreier’s reporting that Doom will continue to be a part of Xbox’s future.
If Gardiner’s figure is accurate, and if Miller’s claim about id’s programming talent is even close to the mark, this could represent more than a standard round of layoffs. It could be the loss of the technical memory behind one of the most important FPS studios in the world.
WGB 