A lead developer at id Software has spoken out about Microsoft’s decision to make major cuts at the developer, and has said it’s “impossible” to make triple-A games like 2016’s Doom with half the staff.
Chris Hayes, lead services provider at id Software, was speaking to Andre Peschke on the Well Played podcast. The roughly 90-minute conversation was focused entirely on the studio’s recent layoffs, covering the events leading up to the job cuts, as well as the push for unionisation at id Software.
“It is hard to make a game that is triple-A, that is like we’ve done before, with half the people. And by hard I mean impossible,” Hayes said. “It’s hard to make a game when there are entire departments that you need: entire disciplines that are gone.”
Hayes added there had been reassurances from higher-ups that “we are still the same id” in the wake of the layoffs. The same sentiment was also shared publicly by the studio, which insisted it had not been “nerfed into the ground and gutted”
Hayes added he believes the reassurances are being given to stop id’s remaining developers from leaving, and claimed they’re part of talking points Microsoft provided to studio heads.
During the conversation, Peschke queried Microsoft’s insistence there are a similar number of developers at id now as there were when 2016’s Doom released, pointing out that game’s credits list a larger number of developers than remain at the studio. To this Hayes said: “There’s a reason they say ‘close to’, because it is less.”
Hayes also discussed Game Pass, and the problems id Software has with the service: “Whenever we see the financial reports that say there were poor sales under Bethesda. Like, what’s a sale if you have Game Pass? Are you saying poor sales means a poor number of games sold? Of course – you aren’t doing a games-sold business model.”
Hayes also shared his belief that those responsible for the cuts don’t understand the business, saying: “They don’t understand art, they don’t understand games, they don’t understand the business model.” When prompted to elaborate on why he believed they didn’t understand art, Hayes said: “When you cut half of a studio, and don’t take into account how [a game] is made, you don’t understand that the cohesion between our teams was what made us successful.”
Id Software was one of multiple Microsoft-owned developers impacted by layoffs last month. As part of an “Xbox reset”, the company announced 3,200 jobs would be eliminated, with 1,600 of those effective immediately and the rest to follow.