A number of former and current employees at Id Software have responded to DOOM director Hugo Martin’s recent comments that the studio hasn’t been gutted by the mass layoffs at Xbox earlier this month.
As reported by Game Developer’s Chris Kerr, “multiple anonymous sources told Game Developer that around two thirds of those left at Id Software who worked on Doom (2016) were laid off at the beginning of the month,” including those that were integral to the veteran team.
One source commented, “I don’t agree with Hugo’s statement and many who were laid off were upset by those comments and saw it as viewing their contributions as insignificant to the success of our games. I’ve been a gamer my whole life. If you cut a stat in half everyone would call that nerfed. In truth the Doom team is half here, half thrown away.”
The source added that the cancelled DOOM 4 nearly brought the studio to its knees, with 2016’s reboot effectively born out of the ashes of that project. However, “it took about seven years and an absurd amount of crunch to finish” the game, and staffers that put in “an unsafe number of hours to make that happen” lost their jobs earlier this month.
Another source stated that Martin’s comments about the size of the studio post-layoffs is only accurate because “there was a ‘massive turnover and exodus’ at id Software from 2010 to 2011,” leaving the company in a bad place. The studio then started hiring and took on external studios to hep with the final push.
Reports that Id Software had been heavily gutted by the Xbox job losses emerged from a former VFX artist, Derek Best, who stated that the DOOM creator had been reduced to the size of a support studio. Soon after, it was claimed by Tom Warren that a new DOOM game was in the works at Id Software, while stating that the company hadn’t been reduced to a support size outfit.
Id Software had reportedly pitched a number of titles prior to the layoffs earlier this month, including a new IP inspired by John Wick and a Perfect Dark game.
[Source – Game Developer via Eurogamer]