Some Of The Most Impressive Gaming Tech Ever Wasn’t Enough To Save Devs From Xbox Cuts

This week, id Software and Microsoft are launching Doom: The Dark Ages Revelations, an expansion to the latest critically-acclaimed entry in the enduring first-person shooter franchise. It's just the second game to make use of id Tech 8, the latest iteration of the engine with its own storied history and influence on the games industry. It could, potentially, also be one of the last, in the wake of Microsoft's brutal gutting of id Software as part of its thousands of announced layoffs.

The scale of the layoffs at the Doom, Quake, and Wolfenstein creators was not initially known when Microsoft announced its plans to lay off 3,200 employees and offload five studios, but the picture is clearer now as former employees have started to share some of the details. Game Developer has reported that around 50% of the studio's workforce was let go during the layoffs. Perhaps more alarmingly is who exactly was let go. 3D Realms founder Scott Miller has shared that, according to information he's received from those familiar with the situation, most, if not all, of id Software's coders have been made redundant. Additionally, Jeff Gardiner, a former project lead at Bethesda Game Studios, has claimed that 85 developers have lost their jobs at id based on what he's heard independently.

That paints a remarkably bleak picture for a studio that has been at the cutting-edge of technology for much of its history. And while that progress hasn't flourished in the same way under ZeniMax, which decided to make the widely licensed engine proprietary and Unreal Engine competitor proprietary in 2011, there's no questioning just how impactful it has been to many of the modern games it empowers. It is the foundation some of the most visually impressive titles in the last decade have been built upon, balancing spectacular visuals with remarkable performance and scalability. 

id Tech is an engine that allowed Doom to retain its captivatingly-fast gunplay without visual sacrifice, even delivering on that same experience when ported to the original Nintendo Switch. It's the same technology that underpins the impressive ray-traced global illumination lighting in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, one of the few games that requires hardware-accelarated ray-tracing but also manages to scale down to work on a Nintendo Switch 2. Doom: The Dark Ages, as the most recent example of the engine in action, is the first in the series that similarly required hardware for its expansive ray and path-traced effects, delivering an uncompromising visual presentation without sacrificing (too much) performance to satisfy the game's reliance on high framerates to keep up with its fast-paced action.

If these reports are indeed true, and id Software has been drained of so much of the talent that keeps pushing these boundaries with id Tech, then it's another promising proprietary engine that Microsoft might bury for good. The Slipspace Engine, used by 343 Industries in Halo Infinite, is being dropped in favor of Unreal Engine as Halo Studios plans for the next iteration of the series, and it's not impossible to imagine the same happening to id Tech. MachineGames, which is reportedly developing a third Wolfenstein game, could very well be doing so with the last version of id Tech that will be seriously iterated upon, leaving the studio to similarly adopt another solution for its future titles. It would also leave just a handful of franchises under the Microsoft umbrella using unique technology, namely the ForzaTech engine powering Forza Horizon and the upcoming Fable, and the Creation Engine that underpins Starfield, Fallout, and The Elder Scrolls.

Maintaining proprietary engines is expensive work, and finding developers familiar enough with the tools to build blockbuster games is even tougher. There are fewer and fewer being worked on around the industry, with even some of the industry's largest studios, such as CD Projekt Red, opting to move over to Epic Games' engine instead. It's why Unreal Engine has seen such explosive adoption over the last decade, coming off of a period where it was already the most dominant licensed game engine on the market. 

Avoiding this convergence of tech requires big investment from the industries largest publishers but often comes with the prestige of pushing the medium into new technical and visual frontiers, and provides a distinctive competitive advantage leveraged as a reason to own one console over another. As Microsoft prepares to launch Project Helix as soon as 2027, this retreat from technology that can best showcase its expensive hardware undermines its goal to reach billions of gamers every day, and robs us all of the potential advancements it could bring to the games of tomorrow.