Majority of id software to be laid off by Microsoft
bsky.appWhat a sad company, Apogee made some of the best games when I was a child, and of course id software's contribution to gaming is immense.
Scott Miller (founder of Apogee/3dRealms) stated that id Software and most of programmers (the team behind idTech and Doom: The Dark Ages) will be let go.
Basically one of the last cutting edge engines not built/maintained by Epic Games (Unreal Engine) will basically die.
Reddit thread with ongoing information regarding the layoffs: https://www.reddit.com/r/Doom/comments/1up5pta/95_reportedly...
step 1: Hey, this gaming company just released a game that made $300mil. With us at the helm we could extract $500 from such game, and release one per year. Lets buy it for couple $B, after all it will pay for itself within 10 years easy.
step 2: Weird, under our glorious leadership we cant ship a game faster than 3 years and they make even less money. Lets close this mess and write it down.
So that's it for id Tech? If so what a sad ending to a legacy going back to the early 90s.
I don't understand why they stopped licensing their technology to other companies? Seems it was a big part of id's business back in the 90s and 2000s.
Are they essentially destroying xbox in order to reduce the on paper value in order to sell it? With all the cuts they can save face as a result of the low price they will accept?
They are cutting to make short term profitability on paper go up to appease Microsoft leadership. Long term, they are destroying themselves, but that is Xbox leadership in 5 years problem.
What a terrible long-term decision. You have a team with incredible talent that ships that you could move to something other than Doom if you wanted, but instead you are laying them off.
Release a single player game day 1 on freaking gamepass, and then wonder why the sales numbers aren't happening. Galaxy brains over at MS are something special.