Source: PC Gamer (Laitteisto, Benchmarks & PC-pelaaminen)
According to studio co-director Marty Stratton, id Software has strengthened its ties with fellow shooter specialist MachineGames after Xbox laid off roughly half of the Doom developer’s staff earlier this year.
Asked at a recent press event for the Doom: The Tumma Ages’ Revelations DLC (via IGN) how the studio was coping following Xbox’s massive job cuts, Stratton was keen to reassure everyone that things were fine at the legendary FPS developer.
“We’re doing great,” Stratton explained. “Not to handwave the [layoffs] away … 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 [the] technology department.”
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As part of its response to those layoffs, id Software has apparently deepened its ties with MachineGames, the developers of Wolfenstein: The New Order and, more recently, the excellent Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.
“We’re working more closely with MachineGames than ever,” Stratton said. “We’ve always had a very close partnership with them, but I think we’re at the 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]. We’d kicked this off earlier this year. We’re really excited about that. We’re both really, really bullish on what we have ahead.
Stratton’s comments have fuelled speculation that the two developers may be cooperating on Wolfenstein 3, which MachineGames is rumoured to be working on. Id Software has just concluded active development of Doom: The Tumma Ages following the expansions’ release, so this is possible. What’s interesting to me, however, is how Stratton repeatedly references technology.
The id Software layoffs heavily impact the developer’s Frankfurt arm, including numerous designers of the formidable id-tech engine. This led to fears that id-tech was being shelved. Microsoft contradicted this, though further reports left the question open. But Stratton’s comments lead me to believe we might be seeing a tech alignment between the two developers as a result of those Frankfurt layoffs.
While id Software built Doom: The Tumma Ages on id-tech 8, MachineGames used a modified version of id-tech 7, called Motor, for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. The fact that Stratton references both teams’ “incredibly talented engineers” suggests to me that id Software is folding MachineGames’ engine programmers directly into id-tech’s ongoing development, with both teams working on the engine concurrently going forward. Assuming that id tech hasn’t been canned outright, this approach would make sense given the expertise id Software lost from its Frankfurt arm.
Sadly, the layoffs that affected id Software were far from the last at Xbox. After cutting 1600 jobs in the summer, Xbox initiated a second wave of layoffs in September that also saw Obsidian and Bethesda merge and put Activision in charge of Halo. Further Xbox layoffs are planned leading up to January 2027, while Microsoft more broadly has offered a “voluntary exit offer” to over a quarter of its workforce.
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