Chris Hays, a lead services programmer at id Software who has worked there since 2010, says Microsoft’s July layoffs left the studio with about half the people it needs to keep making games the way it did before. He also says Xbox does not understand art.
Hays made the remarks in a recent conversation with Andre Peschke on Auf ein Bier, and they land now because they go past the layoff count and into what the cuts mean for the studio behind Doom. Microsoft cut 136 staff in July, and id Software had already said in a July 10 statement that the restructuring left it about the same size it was when making Doom 2016.
Hays disagrees. He says the studio now has fewer people than it had on Doom 2016, and fewer people than it had when it made its earlier Doom games. In his view, that is not a small adjustment. It is a structural break. He says it is impossible to make a AAA game like id has made before with half the people, and adds that the studio is not the same id it was before the layoffs. “We’re half the same id,” he said, arguing that the people and the relationships among them were what made the studio special.
That pushback matters because id Software had spent years rebuilding its reputation as a leading FPS studio, first with Doom in 2016, then Doom Eternal in 2020 and Doom: The Dark Ages in 2025. The July statement tried to reassure staff and outsiders that the studio still had the crew it needed to build the games and tech it is known for. Hays says the reality is different on the ground: entire departments have been gutted, and entire disciplines are gone.
He also says management is receiving talking points about what can and cannot be said, and that those reassurances are meant to prevent more people from leaving. In his telling, the message was not about clarity. It was about calm. He says the studio was told, in effect, that everything would be fine, even as the people who would have to make the games were being asked to absorb a much smaller operation.
Hays says he does not know what the new plan for id Software is, if there is one, and says he was not told. He also says he knows there are serious issues with how Game Pass is done, but did not spell out a fix. For now, that leaves Microsoft and Xbox with a studio that still carries the Doom name, but, by Hays’s account, no longer has the staff base to match the work it was doing before July.
