id Software Layoffs Cut Studio Staff in Half Amid Xbox Restructure
id Software layoffs landed today on the same day the studio shipped a major Doom expansion. Reports emerged within hours that roughly half the staff had been cut, making the release date one of the more jarring juxtapositions the gaming industry has produced in some time. A studio publicly delivering product was simultaneously, and quietly, being reduced by half.
Multiple anonymous sources told Game Developer that more than 90 of approximately 200 id employees were let go. Former Bethesda project lead Jeff Gardiner put the number at 95 on X. Former id employee Michael Maynard independently corroborated the scale on LinkedIn, describing it as "roughly" 50% of the company, The Verge reported today. Neither Microsoft nor Bethesda has officially confirmed any figure.
The cuts are part of what Xbox CEO Asha Sharma called "the most significant restructure in Xbox history." Around 1,600 Xbox roles were eliminated yesterday, with total Xbox reductions expected to reach approximately 3,200 by end of fiscal year 2027, all within a broader Microsoft reduction of 4,800 positions, The Verge reported yesterday.
id is the clearest case study yet in what that restructuring looks like at the studio level and what it costs to keep the IP while cutting the people who built it.
Xbox's franchise-first pivot and what it means for id Software
Bethesda president Jill Braff's internal email, leaked to IGN, makes the strategic logic explicit. Braff told staff Bethesda is "shifting from a planning model primarily centered on what's next for each independent studio to one that focuses on our strongest franchises and determining the content roadmap that best serves our players and Bethesda as a whole." id sits under the Bethesda/ZeniMax umbrella, so that memo applies directly.
The organizational changes reinforce that direction. Xbox is cutting its management layers from 14 to no more than five, but ideally three, and has elevated Helen Chiang to COO with profit-and-loss authority spanning content, hardware, platform, and services, The Verge reported yesterday. That concentration of financial accountability suggests individual studios will be sized to what a centralized roadmap requires, not to what a self-directed creative team needs to operate at full capacity.
Four other Xbox studios were moved out entirely: Compulsion Games and Double Fine Productions are returning to independence, while Ninja Theory and Undead Labs are coming under new ownership, The Verge reported yesterday. id Software was kept. Doom, Quake, and Wolfenstein appear central enough to Xbox's franchise priorities that divestiture wasn't on the table. That protection, based on the reported cuts, did not extend to the people making those games.
Braff's memo suggests a coherent reason why. Under a franchise-first model, studios may be sized around what a managed content roadmap requires rather than what a full creative operation demands. Whether that logic specifically drove the depth of id's cuts has not been made public.
What the id Software layoffs actually removed
The most specific publicly cited figure is 95 people, posted by Gardiner on X and consistent with the anonymous sources who spoke to Game Developer, Polygon noted today.
At least one source told The Verge that id's QA department was significantly affected. That detail has operational weight. QA is the function that catches defects before players encounter them; a smaller testing team can mean longer certification cycles, higher defect rates in shipped products, and more pressure on whoever remains.
Maynard put the human cost plainly. His team, he wrote, had built "arguably THE BEST first person engine technology in the industry," yet Microsoft and Xbox had "decided half the team was deemed USELESS and needed to be let go; despite all the amazing work and effort from every designer, programmer, artist, audio specialist, level designer, fx, tech design, and on and on and on," The Verge reported today. That is a stakeholder account, not a corporate admission. The breadth of roles he listed is consistent with a reduction that ran across functions rather than targeting a single department.
One claim warrants separate handling. Apogee/3D Realms founder Scott Miller said he received insider information that "most if not all coders" at id had been cut, Polygon reported today. That claim is secondhand and has not been corroborated by direct sources. The verified picture, roughly half of staff gone with QA hard-hit and cuts spanning multiple disciplines, is consequential enough without treating that specific detail as confirmed.
What a half-sized id can realistically build
The operational stakes fall across competing workloads: live game support for the current Doom title, development of future titles tied to id's legacy franchises, and the demands of maintaining what Maynard described as the best first-person engine in the industry. Those demands don't shrink when headcount does. They get distributed across fewer people.
CWA District 6 Vice President Derrick Osobase said the cuts "decimated" teams at id, Bethesda Game Studios, and ZeniMax Online Studios, and warned that the layoffs "will lower the quality of these iconic games and make them less fun to play with longer delays in releases, ultimately just hurting the players and driving down revenue for Microsoft," The Verge reported today. That is the union's position and should be read as advocacy. The causal sequence it describes, fewer testers leading to slower certification and weaker releases, is mechanically plausible.
id developers unionized last year, The Verge noted. The union responded immediately and publicly to today's cuts. What role, if any, collective bargaining played in how the reductions were executed has not been publicly detailed, and that question will matter when the full picture of how these cuts were handled becomes available.
id cofounder John Romero, who left the studio decades ago, posted that "Doom, Quake, and Wolfenstein are not easy names to carry on" and that the recent games showed "real care, skill and respect for what those worlds mean to people," Polygon reported today. His framing points to something headcount figures don't capture. Institutional knowledge built over decades of first-person shooter development doesn't transfer automatically when half the team walks out the door.
What comes next
The confirmed facts are significant on their own. Roughly 90 to 95 people, approximately half of id Software's staff, were cut as part of what Xbox CEO Asha Sharma called "the most significant restructure in Xbox history," The Verge reported yesterday. QA was specifically reported as hard-hit, and cuts spanned multiple disciplines, The Verge reported today.
The documented strategy, franchise centralization, management flattening, and consolidated financial accountability, provides a coherent frame for why a studio with strong IP might still be cut to this depth. But the specific business rationale for the scale of id's reductions has not been made public. The inference that this follows directly from the franchise-first model remains a well-supported hypothesis rather than a confirmed explanation.
The real test arrives when id ships next. A smaller team carrying live Doom obligations while developing across three legacy franchises will eventually put something in front of players, and that release will show, more clearly than any internal memo can, whether the franchise-first strategy preserved enough of what made those games worth keeping in the first place.
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