Chris Hays says iD software now has fewer staff than it did for Doom 2016 after July layoffs cut 136 people from the studio. The lead services programmer, who has been with id Software since 2010, said the company is no longer operating at the scale it had before the cuts.
Chris Hays and Doom 2016
Hays said the layoffs left entire departments gutted and entire disciplines gone. In a recent conversation with Andre Peschke on Auf ein Bier, he said: "It's hard to make a game that is AAA, that's like we've done before, with half the people. And by hard, I mean impossible."
He also said: "we're not the same id. We're half the same id." That is a sharper read than the studio's own July 10 line that the restructuring left it at about the same size it was when making Doom 2016, with the crew it needed to build the games and tech it was known for.
Game Pass and Xbox
Hays went beyond headcount and into process. "Studio management is given talking points on things that are allowed to be said and what is not allowed to be said," he said, adding that Microsoft and Xbox were trying to minimize unrest and that the reassurances after the layoffs felt like: "Oh, no, everything is fine. Things will be OK."
He also said there are serious issues with how Game Pass is done and that on the ground level, "we don't get to know what that is." His criticism lands as a business complaint, not a fan gripe: if the studio cannot see the plan, it cannot judge what size of team it needs, or how much freedom it has to make the kind of AAA work it built its name on.
What id Software faces
Hays' strongest warning was direct: "There is a lot more that went into each of the [Doom] games that went along. We made bigger and better games, but that's with twice as many people as we had." He followed that with the bluntest line in the conversation: "So, are we going to make something equivalent to a single-player Xbox 360 game? Because that's the size of the studio we have."
That is the practical takeaway for id Software's remaining staff. The studio's public line says it still has the crew it needs; Hays says the cut has already pushed it below the workforce that made Doom 2016, and that makes the next AAA production a harder internal sell. Microsoft and Xbox have not explained any new plan for id Software after the layoffs, so the immediate question is whether the studio is expected to do the same kind of work with a smaller team or settle for something smaller.
