Doom: The Dark Ages – Revelations, an expansion-sized DLC, was released in July, in the same week Microsoft announced its sweeping 3,200 staff layoffs. The layoffs impacted almost the entirety of the Xbox studio portfolio – including Doom maker id Software.
One of the developers who had spent weeks crunching to ship Revelations on time were laid off just as the expansion was released. Producer Andrew Willis said they spent the two months leading up to launch “working something like at least 12 hours every day”.
“I know I hit 17 [hours] a couple of days. It was brutal, and the majority of the game got made in three or four months,” Andrew Willis told Insider Gaming. “There were days where I didn’t see my son the whole day; multiple days of that that I sacrificed to get this out the door at the level of quality. And it’s not just me, but everybody on the team was really putting in the hours.”
Id Software was hit especially hard in the layoffs, with the studio reportedly losing over half of its members. The extent to which the dismissals will have on the studio’s future has been a matter of debate. Some suggested id Software was gutted, as it lost key senior and longtime staff, many of whom responsible for the id Tech engine and several other core disciplines. Co-studio director Hugo Martin, however, pushed back at some of those sentiments, saying that the team that remains is about the size of the one that made Doom (2016).
Image credit: id Software, Bethesda Softworks.
Willis said crunch wasn’t mandated by the studio, but everyone was overloaded with work that they had to find a way to do it all. “You get loaded up with 60 hours of work in a week, and what do you do?” Willis added.
“You can make a version of that work that would probably be just barely passable, but is that what you want to put your name on? It’s almost this thing, like, at the level of quality that the players expect and that you expect from yourself, it’s kind of, like, almost pseudo-induced crunch.”
Willis added that some of the people on the team had worked for Hollywood for 20 years and game development for 10 “said that this was the worst crunch they’d been a part of”.
“You spend so much of your energy and hours of your life, and sacrifice a bunch of things, to get something out the door, and then they lay you off the day before,” Willis said. “It’s such a wild feeling”.
As Rick Lane argues, regardless of how grim you think things are looking for id Software at the moment, the cuts don’t make a lot of sense. Chris Hayes, lead services provider at id – who remains at the studio – recently spoke out against Xbox’s layoffs, saying it’s “impossible” to make games like 2016’s Doom with the number of people that remains.
Revelations is the only add-on to be released for Doom: The Dark Ages. It’s not yet clear what id’s next project is going to be.