DOOM id Software Xbox gaming layoffs DOOM The Dark Ages Revelations Microsoft Gaming studio business
DOOM Ships Its Expansion the Day After Xbox Guts the Studio That Made It
The DLC Launched. The Studio Didn't Survive the Week.
On July 7, DOOM: The Dark Ages | Revelations — an all-new campaign expansion — unleashed a brutal new chapter of the Slayer's saga. The day before, Microsoft gutted the people who built it.
id Software was reportedly devastated during the latest round of mass layoffs at Xbox, with multiple sources indicating that roughly half of employees at the Texas-based studio had been laid off. A WARN notice filed in Texas confirmed that Xbox subsidiary ZeniMax Media laid off people in the state, with significant redundancies at id Software's office in Richardson, Texas and remote workers reporting into that location.
The scale of the cuts was severe enough that id Software could have lost a majority of its staff. If those figures are confirmed, the developer would effectively lose the ability to independently create new major projects.
The expansion those workers shipped is substantial. Revelations is a full single-player campaign running roughly 10 to 12 hours, weighted around the main story and endgame content — making it larger than both Doom Eternal expansions combined. Players explore vast new levels brimming with secret passages, collectibles, special encounters, and more as they make their way through the campaign. The DLC expands upon the base game's foundation by adding more kinetic movement options with the versatile new Chain Spear as the expansion's centerpiece. The result has been described as a culmination of decades of DOOM design.
That's a hell of a send-off message, intentional or not.
Xbox's "Reset" and What Gets Sacrificed
In what Xbox CEO Asha Sharma described as a fundamental reset of how Xbox operates and invests, the layoffs will affect tens of thousands of people across the company — a significant percentage of Xbox's workforce — with cuts happening immediately and continuing over the coming year. Sharma indicated that the core problem was straightforward: Xbox had spread itself too thin across too many projects and studios.
The financial context for that restructuring is real. Microsoft reported declines in quarterly gaming revenue, driven by drops in Xbox hardware revenue and Xbox content and services revenue — this despite substantial investment in content and hardware over recent years.
The redundancies affected teams across all of Xbox, but hit certain studios — including ZeniMax, Bethesda, and Obsidian Entertainment — quite disproportionately. id Software experienced a severe reduction in force as the team that creates and oversees the modern DOOM games.
What's striking is that the cuts to id Tech — the proprietary engine powering DOOM — drew particular alarm. Cuts to the id Tech team are significant, as the studio's engine has historically been used for non-DOOM projects like the Wolfenstein games and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. Various reports suggest the proprietary id Tech engine may have been affected by the cuts. Bethesda has said it plans to rally around its biggest franchises moving forward — Fallout, The Elder Scrolls, Wolfenstein, DOOM, and Quake — but it's unclear who's going to be left to work on those latter two franchises.
The Human Signal
The developers themselves didn't stay quiet. The shock extended to id's developers, many of whom took to social media to express their astonishment and frustrations. Some employees reacted with messages aimed at both Microsoft and those viewing the cuts as a necessary business move, expressing deep pain about the situation.
That sentiment landed during the same 24-hour window that Revelations went live. The community noticed the collision.
The mechanics of how this happens are worth understanding. DLC of this scale takes many months of development; the expansion was announced during the Xbox Games Showcase in June 2026, but the actual production predates that reveal by a significant margin. The people who shipped Revelations were building it long before any restructuring memo landed. The content was done. It shipped. And then the people who built it — or many of them — were let go.
This is how large studio layoffs actually work: finished products roll out on their scheduled dates regardless of what's happening to the workforce. The DLC wasn't pulled because the studio was cut. But that separation of "the product ships" from "the people survive" is exactly what makes this situation feel so blunt.
What Xbox Is Actually Telling You About Its Priorities
Sharma wrote in her memo that "none of our first party publicly announced games or projects are being cancelled as part of these reductions." That framing is meant to reassure players. Read more carefully, it reveals something else: the products matter; the studios that build them are fungible.
DOOM is on Bethesda's stated list of franchises to preserve. But DOOM: The Dark Ages already established itself as a major launch in id Software's history — and that apparently wasn't sufficient insulation from the restructuring. If your biggest launches don't protect your headcount, the calculation isn't about game quality. It's about organizational complexity and overhead, which is precisely what Xbox leadership indicated it was cutting.
Xbox leadership said the company needs a new business model, and that it has been battered by rising costs, overextending its studio system, underfunding its popular franchises, and relying too heavily on outside vendors. A studio like id — deep, specialized, running its own bespoke engine — looks expensive under that lens, even when it delivers.
Opinion: this is the uncomfortable truth in the "reset" framing. A reset isn't a pivot toward quality. It's a reduction of surface area. Microsoft is betting it can maintain DOOM as a franchise while running a dramatically smaller operation to produce it. That may work. It may produce a leaner, more focused team. It may also mean we've seen the last id Software game built by the people who actually understood what made that engine sing. We don't know yet. Currently, Microsoft, Xbox, and id Software itself have not officially commented on the studio's future.
Our take. Shipping a substantial expansion the day after gutting your studio isn't a coincidence that softens the blow — it's a demonstration of how disconnected product timelines are from human ones, and Xbox should have found a way to handle the sequencing better. Keeping DOOM the franchise while hollowing out DOOM the studio is a bet that deserves serious skepticism.
What to watch. The WARN notice identified cuts but not what survives; the real tell will be whether id Software is building anything new under its own banner within the next 12 months, and whether the id Tech engine appears in any future Bethesda title announcements.
Bottom line. Xbox kept the IP and burned the village — now it has to prove the franchise can outlast the team that made it matter.