A developer from id Software has hit back at Microsoft following the latest round of layoffs, stating that ‘morale has never been lower.’
While no studios were shut down during Xbox’s latest layoff spree, around 3,200 people are set to lose their jobs before the end of the financial year, and several will be sold off to other publishers or allowed to go independent, such as Psychonauts creator Double Fine.
One of the worst affected studios that isn’t going anywhere appears to be Doom developer id Software, which has lost roughly half of its employees. This is particularly devastating because the studio carries so much history, with Doom and Quake both being instrumental first person shooters.
While it’s unclear how id Software will cope in the future, lead services programmer Chris Hays, who has been at the studio since 2010, has spoken out against the layoffs – and revealed the extent of their impact.
‘It was so inhumane,’ Hays said on the Auf ein Bier podcast about the layoffs. ‘It was demoralising, and morale has never been lower.’
He added: ‘It is hard to make a game that is triple-A that’s like we’ve done before with half the people. And by hard I mean impossible.
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‘It’s hard to make a game when there are entire departments that are gutted that you need. Entire disciplines that are gone. So the reassurances that we’re still the same id and we’re still going to do things – well, first of all, we’re not the same id. We’re half the same id.’
These ‘reassurances’ refer to official statements from id Software after the layoffs, which claimed they ‘still have the crew we need to build the games and tech we’re known for’ and that the team right now is ‘about the same size’ when they made 2016’s Doom.
Hays claims the studio management has been told by Xbox ‘things that are allowed to be said and what is not allowed to be said’, in order to avoid internal ‘unrest’ or cause ‘more people to jump ship’ from the developer.
He goes on to criticise Xbox’s view of success with its Game Pass subscription service. Since id Software is owned by Bethesda, which is owned by Xbox, all their games are released day one on Xbox Game Pass.
‘I know that [id has] serious issues with how Game Pass is done,’ Hays added. ‘Whenever we see the financial reports that say that there were poor sales under Bethesda, like, what’s a sale? If you have Game Pass, are you saying poor sale means a poor number of games sold? Because of course. You’re not doing a games-sold business model.
‘And they fundamentally don’t understand art. They don’t understand art, they don’t understand games, they don’t understand that business model.
‘If you cut half of a studio and don’t actually take into account how it’s made, you don’t understand the cohesion between our teams was what made us successful.’
His comments are reminiscent of a famous quote from Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, who suggested in 1995 that, ‘The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don’t mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don’t think of original ideas, and they don’t bring much culture into their products.’
