Gaming

id Software Programmer Says Xbox Layoffs Made AAA Doom Games 'Impossible' to Deliver

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Key takeaways

id Software programmer Chris Hays says post-layoff headcount makes AAA game development 'impossible'.
136 staff were cut from id Software in July as part of Xbox's broader 9,000-person restructuring.
Hays criticized Microsoft's Game Pass model for distorting how the company measures a game's success.

Chris Hays, a lead services programmer at id Software who has been with the studio since 2010, went on record this week criticizing Microsoft and Xbox over the July layoffs that removed 136 staff from the Doom developer. Speaking with journalist Andre Peschke on the German podcast Auf ein Bier, Hays described the cuts as devastating to entire departments and disciplines the studio depends on to ship major titles. His remarks represent one of the most direct insider critiques to emerge from the broader Xbox restructuring that began last month.

Hays did not soften his assessment of what the headcount reduction means practically. 'It's 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,' he said. He added that 'entire departments' and 'entire disciplines' have been eliminated, leaving the studio without key capabilities it would need to produce games comparable to Doom Eternal or this year's Doom: The Dark Ages. id's official statement to IGN on July 10 claimed the studio remained roughly the same size as it was during the making of Doom 2016 and still had the crew needed to build its games and tech — a characterization Hays flatly disputed, saying the current headcount is actually lower than it was during that era.

Hays also took aim at what he called managed messaging from Microsoft, saying studio management was given approved talking points and restricted from discussing certain topics. He framed the internal reassurances as an effort to prevent further voluntary departures rather than a genuine assessment of id's capabilities. 'They don't want unrest,' he said, describing communications designed to signal that everything was fine when, in his view, it clearly is not.

On the question of why id was hit so hard, Hays said he genuinely doesn't know how layoff decisions were distributed. He did connect the situation to Game Pass, arguing that Microsoft's subscription model distorts how the company measures a game's commercial performance. When Microsoft's financial reports flag poor Bethesda sales, Hays noted, that metric loses meaning in a world where players access titles through a flat monthly subscription rather than individual purchases. 'They fundamentally don't understand art,' he said. 'They don't understand games. They don't understand that business model.'

The id Software layoffs were part of a much larger restructuring that new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma described as the 'most significant restructure in Xbox history.' The cuts immediately affected 1,600 employees on the day of announcement, with an additional 1,600 positions being eliminated across the current financial year. id Software, the studio behind some of the most influential shooters ever made — including the original Doom series, Quake, and the acclaimed 2016 Doom reboot — has now become one of the most visible symbols of what critics say is Microsoft's mismanagement of its gaming acquisitions.

The bigger picture

Hays's comments land at a particularly uncomfortable moment for Xbox. Microsoft spent years and billions acquiring Bethesda and ZeniMax to bolster its first-party lineup, and id Software was arguably the crown jewel of that deal — a studio with unmatched credibility in the FPS genre and a recent track record of critical and commercial success. Gutting it to a headcount below Doom 2016 levels, less than four months after Doom: The Dark Ages launched, raises serious questions about what Microsoft's long-term vision for its owned studios actually looks like. Rivals like Sony, which has faced its own studio closures but has largely kept its prestige developers intact, will be watching the fallout closely.

The Game Pass angle Hays raised is worth dwelling on. Microsoft built its entire gaming strategy around the subscription service, but the model creates a measurement problem the company has never fully resolved: how do you evaluate a game's success when there are no traditional unit sales? If internal reporting is flagging 'poor sales' for titles that launched day-one on Game Pass, that signals a fundamental disconnect between how Xbox leadership reads financial data and how developers understand their own audience. That kind of misalignment, more than any single round of layoffs, is what erodes trust inside a studio.

Readers should watch whether additional id staffers — particularly senior engineers and designers — choose to leave voluntarily in the coming months. Institutional knowledge in game development is notoriously difficult to rebuild, and Hays's point about relationships being what made id special is not just sentiment. If the people who built the id Tech engine and designed Doom Eternal's combat systems walk out the door, no headcount number will restore what was there before. The next major Doom title, whatever form it takes, will be a direct test of whether Microsoft's restructuring damaged something that cannot be repaired.

LagPing's take

We wanted to cover Hays's interview because it cuts through the usual corporate silence that follows layoff announcements and gives us a rare ground-level view of what Microsoft's Xbox restructuring actually feels like inside one of gaming's most storied studios. It's easy to treat layoff numbers as abstract figures, but Hays makes the human and creative cost concrete — departments gone, disciplines erased, goals communicated without context. That matters to us at LagPing because our readers aren't just consumers of gaming news; many of them are players who genuinely care about id Software and the Doom franchise. Beyond the specific studio drama, this story connects to a bigger conversation we've been tracking for months: whether Microsoft's Game Pass strategy and financial reporting culture are compatible with making genuinely ambitious games. We don't think that question has a clean answer yet, but Hays's comments add critical texture to it, and we think you deserve to hear what people inside these studios are actually saying.

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