A total of 3,200 jobs will be cut at Xbox by the end of this fiscal year as part of an extensive restructuring. One of the casualties already is id Software, which has lost somewhere in the region of half its staff. That said, if you ask current leadership, everything at the Doom and Quake studio is fine and dandy at the moment.
Marty Stratton, studio co-director of id Software, commented on how the company's been doing since the layoffs hit over the summer during a preview event for Doom: The Dark Ages DLC. "We're doing great," he says, per IGN.
"Not to handwave the [layoffs] away," he adds. "Everybody knows we had about half of our studio exit as part of that. But there was a very deliberate effort to make sure that we were incredibly viable coming out of that across everything we do, across game development and technology department."
Being down half your team is pretty significant. Reportedly, id Tech itself, the studio's in-house engine, is now being managed by exactly one whole person. While that's certainly viable financially, I'm not sure how structurally sound that is long-term.
Stratton goes on. "We're working more closely with MachineGames than ever," he states. "We've always had a very close partnership with them, but I think we're at a point with technology development that both teams are incredibly talented and have incredibly talented engineers and we're really on an amazing path that had started pre-[layoffs]."
A question mark has loomed over MachineGames since the release of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. The prevailing rumor is Wolfenstein 3, and given the general push toward established IP Xbox has been making amid all the redundancies, that seems a safe bet.
But what the collaboration between the two companies looks like, and where that leaves the next Doom, are bigger questions. "We'd kicked this off earlier this year. We're really excited about that," Stratton adds. "We're both really really bullish on what we have ahead."
