Chris Hays, lead services programmer at Doom developer id Software, has criticised Microsoft after the studio was hit by sweeping lay-offs last month.
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Last month, Xbox chief executive Asha Sharma announced “the most significant restructure” in the gaming giant’s history. 1,600 members of Xbox staff were let go as part of the sweeping measures, with a further 3,200 Microsoft jobs to be axed in the near future.
Microsoft also confirmed Xbox consoles would be getting more expensive for the second time in 18 months. “We hoped another price increase would not be necessary, and we have spent the last several months working with suppliers on options. Unfortunately, console storage and memory prices have increased by more than 2.5x and we expect another doubling by the fall of 2027. The entire consumer electronics industry is struggling with the current components crisis, but the effects are particularly hard on consoles,” Microsoft wrote in a blog post.
“Companies don’t get to choose whether their industry changes; they only get to choose whether they change with it,” added Microsoft’s executive vice president Amy Coleman.
As part of the cuts 136 members of staff at Id Software, which was behind 2016’s Doom reboot and sequels Doom Eternal and The Dark Ages, were let go. It’s a decision that lead services programmer Chris Hayes isn’t happy about. Speaking to Andre Peschke on Auf ein Bier, he said (via IGN): “It’s hard to make a game when entire departments [that you need] are gutted that you need and entire disciplines are gone. And by hard, I mean impossible.”
“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. So, we have fewer than we had before. 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.”
He went on to say the studio had “serious issues” with Xbox Game Pass, which features all id Software titles as Day One releases. “Whenever we see the financial reports that say there were poor sales… What’s a sale if you have Game Pass? Are you saying that poor sales means poor number of games sold? Because, of course. You’re not doing a game-sold business model. They fundamentally don’t understand art. They don’t understand games. They don’t understand that business model.”
Earlier this year Thomas Mahler, director of Ori And The Blind Forest and its 2020 sequel criticised “slop” titles released on Xbox Game Pass.
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