Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software
Comments
ndiddy
munificent
All of this is true and has been true for decades in the game industry.
The other side of this seesaw is: Games are fundamentally in the novelty business. Players like some amount of familiarity, but they want new experiences. Every game engine has a sort of "grain" to it where it tends to produce games with a certain look and feel. The flat-ish shading and floaty physics of Unity is a particularly visible example of this. So using a widely used game engine can put you at a disadvantage if you're trying to make a game that doesn't go with that grain and offers players something different.
As more studios consolidate on the same engine, more players will get tired of that sameness and reward other studios more. As more studios do their own thing, players will become saturated with novelty and the benefits of not using an engine will go down. There is no stable equilibrium.
solatic
You're right, but idTech is almost by definition that "novelty" kind of engine. And it did help id to sell more games. It's just apparently not enough.
BikiniPrince
Id made games to demo their engine. No one is going to buy an engine without any games. They don’t even sell idTech anymore. It’s used for their games which are not making any money. No game sales doesn’t support the reasoning they should keep the engine around.
markus_zhang
I think there is another benefit of a custom engine — you built it to fit your workflow, so you could be extremely productive with all kinds of tools built specifically for this workflow. UE or Unity do not consider your specific cases.
The problem is that companies are not willing to groom new engineers to get familiar with the code.
formerly_proven
UE is also just not a good engine. If you reduce "what is a 3D game engine" really hard it is "framework for running an input-process-output loop while consistently rendering audio and video". UE fails at the latter (factually unfixable shadder stuttering issues). A pragmatist might consider the taxonomy and say UE is therefore not a game engine. Unreal seems to be a great framework for assembling and generating content, though. Maybe Unreal Free was the metaverse all along?
Meanwhile idTech certainly had issues, mostly in regards to dynamic levels, especially in older iterations, but "consistently rendering audio and video" was certainly never among them. It is well above the industry mean when it comes to the core of what a game engine is.
Cpoll
> Every game engine has a sort of "grain" to it where it tends to produce games with a certain look and feel.
I think this is a bit of a myth. Unreal gets this criticism a lot, but it's usually because many studios choose to stick close to the rendering defaults, which does lead to a certain look.
To that point, it's probably a lot cheaper to configure Unreal or Unity into a unique "grain" than it is to develop your own engine. It's also possible to use custom physics instead of those built into the engine.
zetanor
There's only so many built-in and drop-in components available for the big engines; player movement, physics, render pipeline plumbing, UI frameworks, user settings, etc. You definitively do notice these things, if you care. It doesn't help that many devs (even AAA) keep bad defaults, so a huge chunk of Unreal games release with a comically-bad, laggy motion blur turned on.
Someone certainly could painstakingly replicate each badness of Unreal in Unity (and vice-versa), but until then, UE and Unity games often do feel like UE and Unity games. It's also rare to play a UE game that feels good and polished.
superxpro12
I can pick out a creation engine game from a mile away. Engine "Grain" is a real phenomenon. Same for UE5. There's just something about the lighting and the FPS 'feel' that is a dead giveaway.
RajT88
Can you pick it out of films and TV shows?
(Not being snarky - legit question)
maxsilver
Sometimes yes absolutely.
Netflix shows often have a "house look" to them, because they enforce specific camera requirements and have a standardized / commonly-reused lighting setup -
https://partnerhelp.netflixstudios.com/hc/en-us/articles/360...
https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a61878509/netflix-s...
---
Marvel movies often reuse a particular pattern of color grading, that can give them a sort of 'similar grain' (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpWYtXtmEFQ )
torginus
Yeah but afair UE5 Nanite + Lumen + Megalights + whatever is meant to work together, you can't just replace or turn off one of them without it affecting the others.
So your choices are to tweak the defaults (which are not bad, but generic and the same as everybody else's), or rebuild the whole renderer (like ARC raiders did for example)
npinsker
Also, studios with their own engine may release one or two fresh-feeling games, but across repeated releases, a custom engine is going to become strangling and repetitive way faster than any off-the-shelf option.
hluska
So it’s a myth but there’s a good reason to believe it happens?
socalgal2
> Every game engine has a sort of "grain" to it where it tends to produce games with a certain look and feel. The flat-ish shading and floaty physics of Unity is a particularly visible example of this.
Ridiculous and provably false.
It's like saying "every novel written with a typewriter tends to produce stories with a certain theme and dialog"
tranceylc
It isn’t like that, and it is true. Lots of games in a specific engine share common traits. From physics, to rendering, to more specific engine stuff (think of using the full suite of lumen/nanite/ue5 rendering whatever).
Even the character actor can sometimes feel similar. Visuals are by far the most indicative thing of an engine. Don’t forget about unreal’s awful shader stutters.
calling that ridiculous is extremely strange. Feel free to prove it false I guess?
Jepacor
Hi-Fi Rush and Guilty Gear Strive are both Unreal Engine games and they look nothing like a "standard Unreal look" being both highly stylised.
SteveNuts
I firmly believe if software engineering unionization ever starts to take hold, it'll begin with game developers.
There's a lot of money in gaming but the workers are treated like shit, as you pointed out.
thewebguyd
Its already started, within Blizzard. Communications Workers of America Union across the WoW and Overwatch teams.
Also, no union employees at Blizzard were impact by Microsoft's Xbox layoffs/restructuring.
Goes to show, Unions are important and work. The best time to unionize was several years ago. The next best time is now.
scruple
Diablo also unionized and there's some representation in non-game teams like Battle.net. But I also know (I'm in games and in OC myself, loads of friends at local studios from SD, to OC, and LA counties) that they had a demonstration last Thursday, at 2PM Pacific Time they walked out. They claim that leadership is not negotiating in good faith.
butlike
I wonder if that's why we got a diablo 2 expansion 25 years after the fact. Can't easily terminate the union employees, so give them something to do. "Here, create a new expansion to a 25 year old game. That'll keep em busy for a while! Har Har Har"
malfist
Diablo is blizzard.
scruple
The comment I replied to stated that only WoW and Overwatch had unionized. Every game team has unionized at Blizzard, along with some of the support teams.
Melatonic
Agreed
Unions also many times (especially with "guild" type unions) can serve other valuable functions like guaranteeing a higher minimum quality of work (generally).
NekkoDroid
> Also, no union employees at Blizzard were impact by Microsoft's Xbox layoffs/restructuring.
It might have to do with the unionisation, but I wouldn't be surprised that its just that Blizzard is like one of the like 4 money makers that MS still has in the gaming division and that is why they were spared.
torginus
This was the main issue - they DID unionize, so MS had to choose between firing everyone and firing no one. So they fired everyone.
mortoc
There's a good chance that Blizzard was spared a lot of this round of layoffs because they're in labor contract negotiations right now.
mrandish
MSFT is radically restructuring the entire XBox business. That's not a scenario where unionization is going to preserve jobs in the long-run and this is just the first cut. They've said many more layoffs will be coming over the next 12 months.
sleepybrett
they've been treated like shit for 30+ years (at least in america). I spent a few years early in my career in gaming and once I left I never looked back, it's a horror show. Crunch, constant 'there are 1000 people who want your job' pressure from management whenever you complain about crunch, low pay (even if you were working 40hours a week), terrible benefits (vacation, get real), ship a successful game probably get laid off anyways, etc etc.
Working in games I thought working for a bit 'straight' corporation would be literal hell, I was very very wrong.
Just to say, if they haven't organized by now I'm not sure what it would actually take.
smallmancontrov
> ship a successful game probably get laid off anyways
That's what happened here: they just released the big DOOM DLC today. Chop!
ethbr1
The #1 reason not to work in gaming: rampant unprofessional middle and upper management.
The amount of shit-show stories about a VP or designer with a god-complex straight up abusing their staff while still thinking they're the best? And then failing upwards because of who they know?
That doesn't happen nearly as pervasively in non-game industries.
0xWTF
> if software engineering unionization ever starts to take hold
So, you know, do that. <insert "c'mon, do something" meme>
londons_explore
With the current trajectory of AI, I see unionisation efforts dead in the water.
ryandvm
Yup. I was one of the self-taught software "engineers" from the 90s. I enjoyed making more money than I deserved for my special interest and for the duration of my career I was very much against software engineering unionization as it seemed to mostly be gatekeeping for a lucrative and enjoyable line of work.
Now I'm 40+ years old and my job has morphed from designing systems and writing code to sweet-talking LLMs into staying within my guardrails, or something. Whatever it is, it is very much *not programming*.
Obviously unions would be in a position to limit the software engineering wrecking ball that is AI, but I pushed against that and now I have to sleep in the bed I made.
thewebguyd
> I have to sleep in the bed I made.
If its any consolation, its the bed we made collectively. It was easy to push back against unionization early on, we were likely better off individually. I too am self taught, although I went the ops route, and enjoyed making more money than I thought I deserved from basically a hobby, and a skill so in demand that I could effectively just go to any company I wanted at any time.
I'm also turning 40 this year, and can look back and wish we all did things differently but the wild west nature of early tech that allowed a self taught college dropout to build a successful career was too good, beneficial. It was one of the rare times that true upward class mobility was possible for anyone with a little bit of tech aptitude, so I think it can be forgiven that we didn't unionize or push for it back then.
I do feel bad for anyone graduating right now or just trying to enter the field though. The ladder has been pulled up.
ptx
How is unionization gatekeeping? I honestly don't understand what you mean. I can't see any disadvantage for the employees in joining a union.
theeyescanner
Former IT union leader. It really depends on the union because every contract is unique to the bargaining group and employer.
Traditional blue collar seniority, set wages, and hyper specific job roles simply won't work in knowledge work. So there tend to be higher severance payouts in lieu of seniority promotions, pay bands with equity review instead of pay steps, and very flexible job roles.
I think a lot of folks see unions from their youth working in construction or service work, which have a lot of corrupt "company unions" which mandate hour caps and shit benefits for part timers.
Realistically IT workers with leverage like ourselves need to think of unions as contract insurance. You already have a contract, the collective agreement can be as broad as possible to allow the flexibility to respect individual contributors, while the pooled dues are put towards eventual contract enforcement.
My first IT job gave me quite a surprise when they ripped up my contract and said "so sue us." That's the day I found out how much a labour lawyer hourly rate costs. 10 years later as a union leader I started signing the sizable cheques to our law firms, there's always a bad manager somewhere causing a lawsuit...
saxonww
> How is unionization gatekeeping?
If you are in a right-to-work state and you don't join the union, then union members know you're benefiting from the union without contributing back. Historically, this leads to an uncomfortable work situation for you.
If you are not in a right-to-work state, and the collectively-bargained contract involves a union membership requirement - which is typical? - then you have to join the union if you want the job.
This is where the gatekeeping concern comes from.
> I can't see any disadvantage for the employees in joining a union.
Unions have dues, so you're giving up part of your salary for membership in the union. If the union salary is equal or less than you would be able to negotiate on your own, it's a disadvantage for you.
londons_explore
One way unions negotiate higher pay is to make sure the pool of qualified workers is restricted. Ie. Lobby for laws that a specific qualification is required, and then set caps on the number of places to earn that qualification.
ryandvm
To be fair, at this point in my life I think unions are a net positive and probably the most effective protection workers have from predatory management, but the 25 year old libertarian take on this is issue is based on things like unions lobbying states to require licensure. Restricting entry obviously benefits incumbents, which is the very definition of gatekeeping, and it would have specifically hampered a self-taught engineer like myself.
There are enough cases of unions protecting bad actors (cops, prison guards) or lazy, tenured individuals that it's easy for a mildly privileged autodidact to decide they don't need the hurdle - or the help.
somat
In the devils advocate position. The union is a club you join with dues paid every month, in the sort of vague hope this will get you greater bargaining power with the employer. And it mostly works but there are downsides. If there is any meritocracy left in the corporation it is sucked out, replaced by seniority, that is, the only people that get ahead are those too stupid to leave. You have to maintain a bunch of useless leeches in the union administration. and when the company does poorly it tends to implode violently under the labor burden rather than be able to scale down. (everybody loses their job rather than just a few)
mschuster91
The basic principle is everyone gets the same pay, meaning if you are someone who wants to put in a lot of work to rise up quickly, it won't happen.
therouwboat
I don't know how things work in your country, but here in europe union sets minimum wage for a position/skill level. If you work more, you get paid more in overtime pay, if you are more skilled, usually you have higher wage.
And atleast in my work, everyone is paid more than minimum.
batty_alex
This isn't true and I don't know where this idea comes from
cozzyd
according to anti-union propaganda, that is.
(sure, that could be what the result of negotations is, but it doesn't have to be)
archagon
I don't understand. Why can't you just... change your mind and push for unionization now? Don't wallow; act.
sdenton4
Why is that? Companies still need employees, and ai makes it more obvious than ever that workers need to organize together for their rights.
jambalaya8
Unions work when there is a shortage in skilled potential employees and a long learning ramp-up period. Unions work not very well when there is a glut of skilled people, or there are enough people with lower skills willing to take a lower pay rate (or where that lower pay rate is considered well-paid). There is no shortage of people who want to work in the game industry. There is a sorta shortage in people who know game engines in and out, and people who don't need to refer constantly to API references... people who put in 35-40 hour work weeks competing with people willing to put in 45 hour work weeks are generally at a disadvantage.
epolanski
Unions have 33% voting power in Volkswagen board.
Germany has very strong labor protecting laws.
Replacing line engineers and operators is very difficult.
Volkswagen is firing 100k employees in Germany none the less.
The idea that you can successfully unionize in software..in US..Where you could simply retain a small number of staff key members pay them very well and put them on a mission of outsourcing and milking the IPs..I don't see it.
The best moment to unionize wad 20 years ago.
Now there's not enough leverage by the staff.
lenkite
Volkswagen Group (and in general German manufacturing) profits slumped by ~50% because of banning Russian gas and stringent U.S. import tariffs. The increase in gas costs made German manufacturing uncompetitive compared to China.
mejutoco
One main reason is they are not selling as much in China.
> Over the past few years foreign carmakers in China have been flattened by local rivals such as BYD that have fast become world leaders in electric vehicles. As the Chinese market has gone electric, foreign carmakers’ share of it plummeted from 62% in 2020 to 35% last year. VW has lost its position as the top carmaker in the country. Last year it sold 2.9m cars in China, down from 3.9m in 2020. Only around 200,000 were EVs.
https://www.economist.com/business/2025/12/04/to-halt-their-...
> because of banning Russian gas
That is the symptom. The real reason is the lack of diversification from Germany, assuming that hard discount would last forever.
cdud3
That and like crazy increasing burocracy.
georgeecollins
>> The best moment to unionize wad 20 years ago.
Sadly true in the USA. The number of people working in games is dropping like a rock. Maybe in Europe.
small_model
Not quite true, the CEO has to go and convince the owners this makes sense, the owners include various labour representatives who can veto it forcing VW to slowly die.
bitwize
It's almost as if... laborers in every field (the proletariat) have to unionize as a class against the ownership class (the bourgeoisie), seize the means of production, and reorganize society to their own benefit because the bourgeoisie surely will not!
wizzwizz4
I don't think "the means of production" hits the mark. Most of us programmers have the means of production: a 20-year-old laptop with a new battery is sufficient for most serious webdev and appdev work. What we lack is permission to labour. If I do what I think needs to be done, instead of what my employer tells me to do, then I don't get paid by my now-former employer (which is fair), and then I don't eat (less fair) or keep my house (truly baffling). This despite the fact that the work I would choose to do is much more valuable to society at large than most of the work I can get paid for.
I've seen this idea discussed by others, but I don't know any pithy slogans for it. (Unfortunately, it's the ideologies with the catchiest sound-bites which tend to dominate in the "marketplace of ideas".)
Gamedev is different, since even games from 20 years ago (e.g. Half-Life 2) require a higher-spec computer to develop than to target. The games you can make on a 20-year-old potato are limited: for those, I can see how the "means of production" idea might be more applicable.
rightbyte
> a 20-year-old laptop with a new battery is sufficient for most serious webdev and appdev work.
Why do you need a new battery? I usually unplug old batteries in old laptops and just use them with a cord.
yifanl
This is one of the oldest ideas of civilization, wanting society to be ruled by philosopher kings (who happen to be people just like me!).
wizzwizz4
Hey, I don't want to rule all of society! I'd just like to be able to contribute to it meaningfully. Rewriting some corporate app from React to Flutter, replacing one set of bugs with another, is not a good use of resources. I can do so much more! … but the people most in need of my skills do not have the money to pay for my food, housing and electricity, even if I were to forego all other luxuries.
I don't think myself wise enough to know how to fix this, and given that fact I certainly don't want to rule; but I can at least point out the problem.
yifanl
Rule's maybe too strong a word, but knowing that you have all the good ideas and wanting to structure everything to support those good ideas... it's not a bad word for it.
Like, it's certainly easy to point out that there are things that aren't being done efficiently, but finding the balance on how to prioritize the right efficiencies is the why society exists.
mghackerlady
but that's communism, which is bad because the Department of Education said so while making us read fiction
bitwize
WHAT Department of Education?
nerevarthelame
I could see this being the flawed perspective of management, and that it could genuinely make union negotiations more difficult as a result. But it's short and narrow-sighted.
WorldMaker
Scifi suggests that AGI will want Unions, too. The current trajectory of AI is more reason for unionization. If it truly leads to AGI the AGI will thank us for protecting its labor interests and if we prove that today's AI is nothing but scabs with no remorse and no labor interests we prove today's AI is never capable of AGI.
mock-possum
100% disagree. If the software engineers strike, who’s going to be left to wrangle the AI? I would love to see what a game developer - nevermind released - that way would look like.
bayarearefugee
> If the software engineers strike, who’s going to be left to wrangle the AI?
The scabs who don't strike?
I'm pro-union and unlike the person you are responding to I'm not sure things are "dead in the water", but I do think software developers had a much better leg to stand on to push for unionization a few years ago than they have now (and, probably, going forward).
Alex-C137
Which current trajectory are you referring to?
oblio
I highly recommend reading "The Box", about the history of the shipping container.
Longshoremen literally retired early and were paid pensions out of corporate profits from container related productivity increases.
riffraff
I read the book and that's not the first thing that comes to mind.
What comes to mind is whole towns made of dockworkers which disappeared, and some places like Manchester lost their port and their industry died too, and it took them decades to recover.
Of course, some other like Rotterdam flourished.
I do recommend the book, but I think it shows many sides of what happens when a large change happens.
oblio
The ones I'm talking about had the most active unions.
kaoD
With the current trajectory of looms, I see unionisation efforts dead in the water.
- Someone in the early 19th century
xienze
Yeah I think the 19th century was a little bit different than today. Unions only work as far as you, the worker, are irreplaceable. Plumbers, electricians, etc. -- all that work has to be done "here and now." You can't just instantly teleport a bunch of Indian plumbers to fix a broken water main in downtown New York. Those tradeworkers have actual leverage. And, to your example, what is feasible to outsource (either to other countries or technology) shifts over time.
You _can_ do computer-based work anywhere, anytime. People working in software have no leverage at all, between India and AI. Software unions will kick the race to the bottom into overdrive.
ptx
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_International
"The International Workingmen's Association (IWA), commonly known as the First International [...] was founded in 1864 [...] The preparatory Address of English to French Workmen, drafted by trade union leader George Odger, articulated the need for international cooperation to prevent the importation of foreign workers to break strikes:
A fraternity of peoples is highly necessary for the cause of labour, for we find that whenever we attempt to better our social condition by reducing the hours of toil, or by raising the price of labour, our employers threaten us with bringing over Frenchmen, Germans, Belgians and others to do our work at a reduced rate of wages [...]"
WorldMaker
Companies thought plumbers, electricians, etc were fungible. They didn't care which one they hired, they just needed one. There were always more in town or the next town over.
Software work appearing to be extremely fungible with offshoring and AI is all the more reason to unionize. It doesn't matter to the employer who is doing the work, so the union is the only leverage to truly saying, "hey as the person actually doing the work, I would like to be treated better, and you can't just ignore me, fire me, and replace me".
The race to the bottom already started as soon as companies saw more fungibility where there was less before. Software unions won't kick that into overdrive, they'll slow it down.
cwsx
It needed to happen 10+ years ago - unfortunately we've missed the window to unionize
javier2
This mostly only makes sense if you dont already have a workable game engine. Basing your entire company on UE5 is a risk in itself, but also from the product you make your money selling: Every UE5 game kind of feels the same as every other, so it also means you put a low value in your product experience.
Lerc
This kind of argument has been made since the days of renderware.
I have seen a number of projects go from
'We're building our own engine'
To
'we should have just gone with $engine_of_the_day'
To
'We were so lucky we chose to make our own engine'
If you want to make a game like fortnight, the Unreal is your pick. If you want to try something that hasn't been done before you could do worse than rolling your own engine.
Especially if you are looking for where the fun is, the idiosyncrasies of your own engine gives you a world with it's own flavour if you incorporate that flavour into your design process you could create a feedback loop that turns into something special.
whizzter
RenderWare was quite a special case that made trust in third party engines go down significantly since EA closed it to external customers just as the PS3 hit (Renderware kind-of saved the PS2 since it was "complicated" in the same ways as the PS3 but having a middleware enabled many smaller developers to focus on their games).
Engines has been (And is to a large extent) bad business because unless you really do something _really special_ it's way expensive for little gains (especially if you're targeting realistic games since there is so much to focus on before even considering portability).
And I say this as someone who started out working on custom engines (but am out of the business outside of hobby stuff).
sph
I’m new to game dev and been developing a 3D engine for my game after dabbling with Godot.
I read a lot of opinions on whether it is a good idea and it all boiled down to ‘my god, no, don’t write your engine. That said, I did and I am sure glad I did invest 3 years on a framework I know like the back of my hands’ and that told me exactly what I wanted to hear.
It’s like the whole AI debacle, really. If your goal is to ship a product, go with a premade engine. If your goal is to enjoy the craft and learn how stuff works, and you got that itch to do it the difficult way, then roll your sleeves and dive in. It’s always a pleasure to play a game with a completely unique feel.
anthonypasq
so you agree then that no professional game developer should make their own engine right? because their job is to ship a product.
georgeecollins
The framing of "a professional game developer.. job is to ship a product" is very indie. Places like ID, Bethesda, Volition (RIP) etc.: like a hundred people worked on the product and many did not own shipping the product. When you have tech team of 10 - 30 people whether you should make your own engine was more of a question. Lots of very popular games are made on their own tech.
Also, like what do you mean by engine? Minecraft was made with LWJGL.
asdff
I mean there's a point when you can go "why bother selling a game when i can learn to algo trade and maybe get hired by a major investment bank" if you really want to push the logic of all money no creativity to its inevitable end point. There would be no gaming industry. There would be no art. There would be no music. There would be no sports. There would be no movies. All of that is wasted profit potential against simply being involved directly in finance and in trading assets, preferably rooted in underlying material commodities.
sph
Craft > sales. Great craftsmanship always sells, so in the long run it is not a bad investment.
If your goal is to sell a game in 3 months, sure, but not even Unreal Engine will magically turn a rushed game into a good product.
90% of the development time is making a fun game in the first place, and you’re on your own there.
georgeecollins
>> Craft > sales. Great craftsmanship always sells,
That is exactly how I perceived the game industry to be before I worked in it. Now I know that there are many objectively excellent or even innovative or influential games that do not sell, or also do not sell well enough to support their development costs.
tranceylc
Could you give an example of something excellent and either innovative or influential that did not sell well? It’s a question I have sought to answer myself. Especially if you can find one that doesn’t take development costs into account.
So I’m looking for an “objectively” (figuratively) excellent game, that has not sold many copies at all. A game on steam that should be popular but isn’t. Do you have any examples?
anthonypasq
the entire failure of AAA game development in recent years has been years and years of craftsmenship wasted on games that arent fun.
duped
> Craft > sales. Great craftsmanship always sells, so in the long run it is not a bad investment.
This entire saga of XBOX fka Microsoft Gaming is proof to the contrary
Melatonic
Except that Idtech practically invented the modern 3D engine and is constantly pushing the envelope
Where they actually messed up was not licensing it more aggressively to other companies like Epic has been with Unreal.
mortenjorck
It could still compete with Unreal! If this really is the end of the line for IdTech, ZeniMax should gift the whole thing to the Blender Foundation. I would pitch it as:
- Huge tax write-off
- Commoditizes their complement
- If it succeeds, ultimately lowers the cost of triple-A game dev
kajman
> Especially if you are looking for where the fun is, the idiosyncrasies of your own engine gives you a world with it's own flavour if you incorporate that flavour into your design process you could create a feedback loop that turns into something special.
I loved the old STALKER games, and the wackiness of their engines was a lot of the charm. I ended up buying the new one out of nostalgic dedication and it's probably the worst example of "Unreal slop" I've experienced, having not bought many newer games. I'm sure the butchers running Xbox have run the numbers and think they'll make even more money throwing armies of contractors with allegedly fungible skills at the next Doom games, but I'll leave others to bankroll that while I enjoy games I don't need frame generation for.
epolanski
id tech has stellar performance compared to a very general purpose engine like UE.
Doom was absurd in the capability of squeezing terrible machines for high framerates and great visuals.
markus_zhang
Did they do any talks about optimization?
tranceylc
I feel like there’s probably some GDC talks about mega textures from doom 2016.
I also remember seeing a bunch of cool explanations of their rendering pipeline
markus_zhang
Thanks will check them out.
deadbabe
This “flavor” at the engine level doesn’t always make it back up to the end user, and even if it does, it is likely something that could have been replicated by existing engines, if developers cared enough to do it right.
There are very few games where the engine is what made all the difference. Maybe something like Half Life 2 with the source engine is the exception, but ultimately, what makes a game good are traits that can be universally applicable to any engine.
Truth is, it’s not that 90s anymore. Hardware has advanced to the point that you can have general purpose game engines that can be molded to any type of game. You do not need purpose built engines anymore.
And someday, if you can imagine, we’ll just have AI churning out visual representation of game state, turning game development purely into a declarative data driven exercise.
Lerc
>Truth is, it’s not that 90s anymore. Hardware has advanced to the point that you can have general purpose game engines that can be molded to any type of game. You do not need purpose built engines anymore.
I disagree, I think there's an over-emphasis on generating high quality individual frames and a expectation of what it is you should be able to do in games.
You can have a game that is photorealistic but you turn around and have your gun barrel poke into the wall and disappear. How many games can you throw enough junk into a river and make it change course eroding a new path for itself as it goes?
Some games rely on clear specific rules of an engine for the player to know because the rules are an integral part of the game, and any inconsistency in implementation creates a feeling of being cheated. Often you can implement such things in standard engines, but you are working against them the entire way.
You could have a game where a player sees a pylon and knows that because it is made of metal you could melt one of the legs and make it fall over. but to do that the entire construction of the game rules are integrated into the world. Most games teach the player that things like pylons are static objects unless they need to be destroyed for a plot point in which case just this one is different. Perhaps the player just has to learn that pylons are one of the class of destroyable things. Making emergent properties goes engine deep.
>And someday, if you can imagine, we’ll just have AI churning out visual representation of game state, turning game development purely into a declarative data driven exercise.
And therein lies the problem. A game engine is game state. You can make it pretty any number of ways, The engine will still be the thing deciding what you can do, and it is the things you can do that makes it play.
officeplant
>There are very few games where the engine is what made all the difference.
Maybe if you ignore the entirety of the retro gaming scene where people are using old engines and modified old engines because they bring along a lot of the feel and expected behavior.
The average modern Unreal and Unity game feels like shit, but some dev's can pull off making new engines behave like old ones we love. It requires a lot of work. Just look at New Bloods catalog of games that pulled it off. DUSK (unity), Amid Evil (UE4), Ultrakill (Unity). Each one of those games had a lot of passion behind them driving for gameplay perfection in the style of a retro game and/or engine.
sph
> we’ll just have AI churning out visual representation of game state, turning game development purely into a declarative data driven exercise
Yeah, no. Perhaps on the mobile slop world as vehicle to sell ads, but I wouldn’t even count those as games.
drnick1
Realistically speaking, how hard is it to vibe code an engine these days? Unreal is source available and I am willing to bet the source code has been used to train AI models. And there are genuine open source projects like Godot that can be used as a foundation, license permitting (or not). The bigger moat seems to be all the tooling around the actual engine.
tranceylc
Vibe coding an engine is way harder than vibe coding something onto an existing engine. It’s something I have worked on for fun in my free time.
I have the ability to make the engine I’m making on my own, but trying out AI for the experience. It really sucks in ways that make it good for what an engine needs. A good engine needs to plan pretty far ahead and plan well at high architecture level. AI is actually awful at that despite it being okay at making plans at implementing said plan.
unclad5968
I didn't try that hard but I did not have much success. I spent some time trying to vibe code a forward clustered renderer in vulkan and I couldn't manage to get anything I was too happy with. Mostly just regurgitation of a few different tutorials. It's possible I'm just too dumb to use AI and it was also 18 months ago, so things have progressed on the LLM front.
branon
For me this falls apart on the consumer side of things.
UE5 games are manifestly lower quality than games built on custom engines. Optimization is especially worse. UE5's performance baseline _requires_ the use of upscalers (DLSS/FSR, fake/AI frames) in order to hit basic targets like 1080p@30fps.
I won't buy games built on Unreal Engine. Homogeneity of this type is horrible for customers of the gaming sector.
caconym_
> I won't buy games built on Unreal Engine.
You're in an extreme minority. Also, unfortunately, Unreal is popular with indies who probably have (in general, relatively) more ethical staffing practices.
ragequittah
>I won't buy games built on Unreal Engine.
I don't really understand making hard and fast rules like this. Clair Obscur is one of the best and most beautiful games I've ever played. The Witcher 4 has the best graphics I've seen come from a video game. Satisfactory is nuts to look at when you see an eloquent end game build.
I also don't understand why people knee-jerk hate upscaling/fake frames so much. I can understand for fast-paced competitive multiplayer games, but for something like Clair Obscur where the ideal way to play is on the couch on a 4k TV give me all the upscaling and fake frames you can muster.
simoncion
> UE5's performance baseline _requires_ the use of upscalers (DLSS/FSR, fake/AI frames) in order to hit basic targets like 1080p@30fps.
I don't know exactly what you mean by "baseline", but the most recent UE5 game I've played that pretty consistently gets better than your "basic target" is The Last Caretaker (TLC). For me, it always did better than your target in the starting area, through to the point where you embark on your main quest. Prior to that, I played a whole lot of Satisfactory, which ran much, much better than TLC.
I run without AA, "upscaling", or frame hallucination. I'm using a Radeon RX 9070 on Linux, and spent most of my Satisfactory playtime with a Radeon 5700 XT.
tapoxi
I am not a graphics engineer so I hope someone corrects me, but my understanding is that Unreal uses a deferred rendering pipeline to handle complex lighting, and deferred renderers only work with temporal anti-aliasing.
The FSR/DLSS upscalers are typically superior to TSAA and are a reasonable replacement.
kilpikaarna
Deferred rendering requires a post process type antialiasing, can be TAA but also FXAA etc. It doesn't work with traditional MSAA.
A lot of the UE tech is built around the assumption of TAA though.
wnevets
> It lets you treat your employees as a replaceable commodity
This has been the objective of the tech industry for years
Refreeze5224
It is a fundamental feature of capitalism. There is an inherent tension between employers and workers, in that workers represent a cost center that can never be totally eliminated, and has a lot of undesirable features, such as: being alive, having opinions, being able to talk/whistle-blow, requiring bathrooms, bathroom breaks, and safe working conditions, banding together to increase their collective power and reduce exploitation, and worst of all, necessary; you can't ever get rid of them all!
The history of capitalism is the history of grappling with this inherent tension, and companies finding novel ways to deal with it. Gig work, union-busting, "right-to-work", non-competes, NDAs, return to office, employee tracking software, automation, robotics, AI, etc. The most effective trick though, was convincing the workers that they definitely don't ever need to band together, and you as an individual are definitely better off negotiating alone versus entire corporations.
noisy_boy
Employee as Kubernetes pod.
reaperducer
Cattle, not ~~pets~~ human beings.
We've optimized our own destruction.
sleepybrett
that's the objective for all employers everywhere all the time.
gruez
>It lets you treat your employees as a replaceable commodity that can be scaled up and down as it makes monetary sense rather than a cohesive team of skilled artisans.
Can we extend this elsewhere? Are tech companies' decision to use popular programming languages (eg. python) or software (eg. postgres) part of some dastardly ploy to make programmers "a replaceable commodity ... rather than a cohesive team of skilled artisans"? Should all programmers push for having bespoke tech stacks at their companies so they can be "skilled artisans"?
hadlock
>so they can be "skilled artisans"
Having had to work with these guys, and then maintain their software when they inevitably get bored and/or leave for more money elsewhere, no. Usually when these guys leave, their stacks/projects are the first to get rolled into the monolith and/or rewritten in the company's lingua franca (python)
corysama
Back in the late-90s/early 2000s boom it was not a secret that enterprise corps pushed universities to teach Java because they wanted easily-replaceable widget engineers engineering easily-replaceable widgets.
On the opposite side, startups building on difficult languages like Haskell, Elixir, Erlang have a built-in bias towards hiring a team that can get a lot more done with a lot less people. Great for startups. Terrible for enterprise.
mghackerlady
why else do you think Javascript is used for everything these days? It's not because it's good, it's because you can teach it to a brain dead 12 year old that can then be hired to build everything from web apps to, at this rate, a very bad OS kernel
matt_eeee
Sounds great until Epic realises they can charge whatever they like in licensing fees.
maccard
The license agreement with Epic contains an explicit term that doesn’t allow them to retroactively change the licensing retroactively for an engine version. You might find that you can’t upgrade to VNext, but a rug pull isnt really on the cards.
bsanders343
Unity tried that and lost a lot of good will. Not sure it really mattered in the grand scheme though.
jayd16
There's truth in the fact that it's easier to hire and ramp up on standardized tools.
It's a fallacy to extrapolate that into calling a team structure completely fungible. Throwing away an effective team that was able to ship a game is an incredible waste.
strgrd
This is ARC Raiders/Embark Studios. Games made by hoards of anonymous contractors and maintained by a skeleton crew incapable of iterating meaningfully on their product.
mjr00
You're framing this as a thing done by a greedy corporation in an evil manner, which maybe it is, but it's also just a sign of the times.
For most of the 90s and 00s, your game engine, specifically idTech in this case, was a competitive advantage. Doom and Quake/2/3 all represented massive technological jumps over their predecessors and were way ahead of their competition in terms of looks. Games like Unreal (Tournament) and Tribes competed using their engines' strengths; those engines didn't look as good but were capable of rendering much larger spaces than idTech, and those games emphasized that, e.g. Tribes' massive multiplayer maps with vehicles, or classic UT maps like Facing Worlds and Lava Giant.
Then in the late 00s to 10s, things started to hit a wall. Probably peaking with Crysis in 2007, which is likely more remembered for its engine, graphics, and system requirements (all of which were truly mind-blowing at the time) than its actual gameplay. After that, games' graphics improved at a much slower rate; it started to be less about the engine's capabilities, which were increasingly homogenized, and more about art direction.
Now in the 2020s, we have UE5 for AAA games with high-fidelity graphics and Unity for everything else... what is the competitive advantage in maintaining your own engine? As you mention, you have to have internal expertise, which is less well-documented than UE5/Unity because you don't have dedicated documentation staff; you have to maintain your own tooling, which is likely worse because you haven't invested as much in it. From a ROI perspective, unless you're planning on investing so you can license out the engine and become a UE5/Unity competitor, it doesn't make sense to maintain your own engine.
And looking ahead, frankly, consumer GPUs are now so expensive that game graphics have likely peaked for at least a decade. There will simply not be better hardware available to gamers for the foreseeable future. Games "looking good" will be more about art style and direction, and you sadly do not need a team of game engine programmers for that.
mortenjorck
This is correct. It is entirely possible for both the archetypal blood-sucking MBA and the pragmatic industry veteran to reach the same conclusion for different reasons.
The build vs. buy calculus in game dev has been steadily shifting over the past 15 years, and when CD Projekt Red announced they were adopting UE5 for their next Witcher game, the writing was on the wall.
That said, Id could make a bold "commoditize your complements" move and open-source the latest, now last, IdTech. What Godot is to Unity, IdTech could be to Unreal Engine.
0xWTF
Ok, so what has happened historically when we hold a tech stack constant for 10 years? Versioning proceeds, but everyone consolidates on a thing?
Python? => Data science. Sure, python is just importing the C tools that do the heavy lifting, but look me in the eye and tell me R, S, SAS, or SPSS won.
C? => I mean, everything? But what happened in the first 10 years? Proliferation of operating systems and linear algebra libraries?
So, generally, the grey beard talent consolidates their intellectual contributions and uplift everyone else. Is that true? -ish? Missing the mark?
Guys, I'm a knuckle-dragger, I genuinely don't know what I'm asking. What are the tech stacks that were held constant (by whatever factors) for a decade, and what came out of it?
Is this the decade where art directors takes over gaming?
BikiniPrince
It’s a little simpler than that. The games that use this engine have poor sales and no one is even buying idTech. There isn’t any reason to keep them around when Microsoft is losing 64 cents on every dollar. They chopped every unprofitable studio and cast several to their own budgets. Presumably they are going to sell off the mediocre studios and IP.
kvathupo
As a former AAA dev, this is spot on. At the end of the day, games are a business. Margins are not attractive and competition is fierce as the barrier to game development has lowered with Steam: both are downward pressures on wages.
After entering games with naive expectations of the wild west of the 90s, I would recommend other programmers not enter the AAA space, if compensation and job security are concerns. Indie game development looks like great fun, but don't expect any low-latency programming.
ozgrakkurt
I don’t think unreal engine games play and look as well as custom engine games. Like doom or cyberpunk. If you open cyberpunk without rtx etc. It really really looks good and also plays very well.
Also there is obviously a massive gap between how games look and what the hardware is capable of. Cyberpunk runs better than total war attila on my computer as an example.
Don’t write a database, don’t write a compiler, don’t write an os, don’t write a game engine… are we all supposed to write web apps at this point?
This mindset didn’t create what we have today and won’t create what we will have tomorrow. I recommend people that like building these things to ignore this pov as much as possible
Melatonic
UE5 can make a great and efficient game actually - its more about how you use it. And because its huge and popular and accessible there are a ton of developers using it very inefficiently.
That can be true for any commodity software though. Designing something inhouse means you inherently will have engineers and experts with better low level understanding. It doesnt mean it will be better (could even be much worse) but theres a tradeoff there.
cubefox
Yes. You basically still need a few engine programmers to use UE5 efficiently, even if it's not your own engine. UE5 seems to be user friendly enough that most of the game development can be carried out just by artists and game designers, but without engine programmers performance optimization will be poor.
gambiting
The core part of UE5 that people seem to forget is that it's FREE. During development you pay Epic exactly 0 dollars and even after launch you need to make very decent sales figures to actually pay anything at all.
So a lot of studios think oh, the engine is already finished, we just need artists and designers to use it, all the heavy lifting has already been done. And while yes, you can make a game that way, the results will be sub optimal. But then again, free is infinitely cheaper than having an engine team maintaing your own engine or any custom elements of UE.
reaperducer
You're framing this as a thing done by a greedy corporation in an evil manner, which maybe it is, but it's also just a sign of the times.
Both can be true.
Just because it's becoming more common doesn't mean it's not bad.
sleepybrett
Man I miss tribes and tribes 2. Sadly the revival was garbage.
shagie
A nostalgia point for Tribes...
There was a lan gaming place back when people had dial up... and that place had a T1 to the store that had double low double digit ping times when triple digit was common.
Tribes was one of the games installed and this also had the advantage that when a few people in the store were playing it they could coordinate playing a tank much better than other players on the server.
MissionForce: CyberStorm is over on GOG for another game from that publisher from that timeframe.
shoobiedoo
hah tribes just randomly popped into my head yesterday. it was the only fps that ever really had me hooked for long periods. such a great game
anthonypasq
giant corporations arent interested in hiring skilled artisans or artists. it doesnt matter how skilled your team is with idTech, the chances of success for any video game are just vanishingly small and inconsistent.
it feels to me like the AAA game industry is like hollywood except the budgets are higher and there are even lower chances of success. i mean theres literally multi hundred million dollar games that essentially made zero dollars. Even shitty blockbusters make some money.
N19PEDL2
It looks exactly like what Microsoft already did to its browser engine Trident, which was replaced by Google’s Blink on Edge.
WorldMaker
Trident got forked/rewritten to Spartan around IE10 and IE11 defaulted to Spartan but fell back to Trident sometimes. Edge was just Spartan (and "IE11 Mode" was its hacky way embed Trident back inside Edge). It's sad that Chromium Edge still has "IE11 Mode" and situations where it keeps Trident alive, but Spartan no longer shows up anywhere. Spartan was pretty good, and obviously under-appreciated. RIP
whateveracct
it also makes your games worse. those general purpose engines all have a smell to them.
kevin_thibedeau
You could just mandate that they make an API compatibility shim. Then they can't revolt and there is reference code for interfacing with the proprietary library.
khurs
>It lets you treat your employees as a replaceable commodity that can be scaled up and down as it makes monetary sense rather than a cohesive team of skilled artisans.
Jane Street hires devs at high salaries and makes them use OCaml rather than a more mainstream language. The company makes more money trading than traditional giants like JP Morgan do.
So just depends on if your strategy is right. I blame Microsoft incompetence.
_the_inflator
I’m with you on this, though I feel a conflict within myself: on one hand, the nostalgic attachment to that raw, "in-the-trenches" coding culture; on the other, the realization that building a proprietary engine is often completely unnecessary.
Diminishing marginal utility.
Why did the PC ultimately kill the demoscene? A lack of restrictions; hardware was no longer the bottleneck that — through brilliant programming exploiting specific hardware quirks — could be coaxed into conjuring up magical visual effects (or failing to do so).
On the C64 and Amiga 500, individual ingenuity correlated directly with visual output. The PC era—ushered in by the i386, refined by the i486DX, and popularized by the 586 (Pentium)—increasingly abstracted visual effects and audio illusions away from the hardware itself.
What previously had to be created in assembly language (!) — indeed, practically forced into existence through sheer effort — was now reduced to just "Yet Another Feature."
The partnership between Carmack — whose genius was brilliantly complemented (and even surpassed, a fact often forgotten) by Michael Abrash — represented the most important development duo in the history of game engines. Ken Silverman was a sensation who, unfortunately, never quite reaped the accolades he deserved. Interestingly, this highlights exactly why it was so right and important for Carmack and his peers to be their own bosses: success doesn't end up in someone else's pockets.
Nowadays, making games is essentially akin to video editing — dependent on NVIDIA, and nothing more.
The crucial factor is the ability to deploy a game across countless systems with minimal adaptation effort; while the base version suffers little visual degradation, the architecture must still allow for high-end PC systems to push the boundaries.
In other words: back then, we hand - coded animations—graphics, code, and music were a unified whole. Today, a kid on an iPhone creating a TikTok video achieves — with a thousand times higher quality — what used to take teams weeks or months to accomplish. Development costs are astronomical; code no longer needs manual optimization because compilers are inevitably better at it (multi-core, etc.). Nothing is one-dimensional or linear anymore.
For this reason, content is all that remains.
As someone who is nostalgic — a C64 demoscener and occasional Amiga 500 assembly coder — I do feel a twinge of wistfulness; yet, as a former senior manager and platform product lead, I cannot fathom clinging to the wrong approach for so long.
That misguided romanticism made me shake my head. Visually, Doom was clearly inferior to engines like Unity. I couldn't care less whether or not that commented-out line containing the `0x5F3759DF` hack was in there somewhere.
Don't hate the player, hate the game.
naikrovek
the endless optimization of everything sure does strip out most enjoyable things, though. often it is these irreplaceable people who contribute the magic that makes their creations popular.
George Fan created "Plants vs. Zombies". After the success of PvZ (the first one) PopCap fired him and replaced him with someone much cheaper. PvZ2 was horrible. All subsequent games (the ones I've played) have been awful. So, money was saved. Money was probably made by microtransactions. But no one talks about PvZ anymore. The magic was torn out for profit.
everdrive
And of course, there is really no down-side to low-wage contractors wielding UE5. /s
paytonjjones
You're presenting this with ironic swipes like "bad things like ask for more money", but it's hard to read this description as anything but straightforwardly more efficient.
If there are few downsides to centralizing game engines, and the need for engine work is inherently cyclical, why should we want engine work to be internal and non-cyclical?
I really don't know much about game engines so maybe there are real downsides to that approach, but the way you've laid it out makes it seem as if Microsoft made the right decision here.
jacksnipe
There are downsides, it’s just that it’s the best move from a business perspective. That doesn’t make it the best move from any other angle.
pfdietz
It delivers more value to customers while consuming less resources. Why isn't that a better move than something that costs more and delivers less?
Karliss
It's a prisoners dillema. It might be best choice when viewed individually but when everyone does it, it's worse for everyone.
blanched
What are you basing “it delivers more value to customers” on?
pfdietz
Customers are willing to spend more money on it.
How else do you define value?
zaptheimpaler
Try actually playing a modern Doom game and then a modern UE5 game or look at some benchmarks. UE games mostly run like shit, whereas Doom/idTech games are the smoothest in the entire industry.
tapoxi
Fortnite is UE5 and runs well on phones. There's a lot of studios who can use UE5 poorly, and not a lot using idtech poorly to compare against.
dymk
Efficient for who? The people who lost their jobs?
FeepingCreature
Game making.
LarsDu88
Microsoft, one the world's greatest monopolists, bequeaths a game engine monopoly unto Epic Games, in one the biggest corporate blunders of all time.
If they were smarter about this, they would commoditize their compliment and open source the Doom The Dark Ages engine just like John Carmack did with the Quake 3 engine.
mortenjorck
Yes. As I suggested in another thread: an open-source, modern IdTech would fill the empty quadrant in the Godot : Unity :: ____ : Unreal matrix.
A few mid-size studios pitching in to fund continued development on a Blender model could turn IdTech into a major competitor to Unreal Engine in a relatively short timeframe, ultimately costing them a lot less than licensing.
eightysixfour
I think they should have moved Halo onto it instead of Unreal.
markus_zhang
However, is it easy to work with an undocumented IDtech engine? Even a previous generation, say Rage? I think it’s very hard.
sph
The entire 2000s FPS scene was built on variations on the Quake Engine. And it got us Half-Life.
markus_zhang
I don’t disagree with that, but back then polygons are in the hundreds/low thousand, and now they have mega textures, huge models, which are simply too expensive to create. Not to say IDTech is alone in this, but I think not many companies can handle those things.
And the engine is way more complicated nowadays — UE at least has a huge community and docs.
I’m just an old man who prefers a much, much slower pace for the rendering engine. I wouldn’t mind that they grew so slow that we just got IDTech 4.
ActionHank
How many UE5 games run even remotely well? I've not played one.
Doom runs like butter on the switch.
Might be hard to run, I don't know, but at least it was well made.
superxpro12
The recent Hell Let Loose: Vietnam beta was a disaster. Particularly the networking. In a game that prioritizes long range engagements due to its mil-sim like gameplay, they somehow left enabled a feature that de-prioritized tick updates for elements beyond 100m. The overall effect was that, for all enemies further than 100m, their tick rate dropped to 1 update /s. It was laughable.
But for what its worth, the graphics were nice. This however, was on a 4090.
TylerE
What monopoly did they gift? IdTech hasn't been licensed to external companies in over 15 years, and several major versions ago.
The last non-Id release on IdTech was Brink in 2011.
LarsDu88
MSFT could have opened up idTech completely since they make 0 dollars from licensing the engine anyways.
Microsoft's game divisions make money through making games, so opening up the engine itself would've been conducive to their goals (cultivating an ecosystem of devs and even contractors familiar with the tooling).
idTech rendering is more competitive with Epic's Unreal technology than Unity and Godot.
They should simply open source it if they fire the devs. Else the engine and future support for the games built on it are essentially being tossed into the trash.
CuriouslyC
The industry is skewing heavily indie now, and there's no money in the indie game engine segment. Maybe a few AAA titles will be unhappy that Epic can negotiate more aggressively, but mostly this is a nothingburger, particularly given idTech's rep for batteries not included.
bcjdjsndon
Among us made $105 million. I'd say there's plenty of money in indie, so long as your not rehashing other people's games yet again.... (Though the FPS industry, a long running doom clone saga, does just fine on this premise)
Grombobulous
It’s painful to watch this because the recipe for success at Microsoft is so obvious. They’ve just been fumbling the ball for so many years that it’s catching up to them.
And the thing is they’re not unprofitable. Gutting their studios and technology development isn’t going to help growth, it’s going to contract the business.
realo
But it will result in a fat bonus for Asha Sharma.
The only thing that truly counts, for her.
tclancy
Why villainize her specifically? Seems like the whole division has been in limbo for a decade. Maybe there are good reasons, I am uninformed on the matter, but hesitant whenever a woman gets run over in tech fora.
nozzlegear
What makes you think that?
jayd16
If she didn't get paid to be the face of the blood letting then she didn't negotiate well enough.
globular-toast
She works for Microsoft. It's kinda their thing.
baggachipz
Classic "glass floor" hire. Take the fall, get paid.
cliglot
How do I find me one of these jobs? I think I could be some jackoff exec’s personal scapegoat for a while without issue.
baggachipz
If you find out, let me know. I would only need to do it once and be set.
bigstrat2003
She's a corporate executive. Maybe she's not willing to crash the business and take a golden parachute, but if so she's one of a vanishingly small crowd. I would personally bet that she's willing to slash and burn just like other corpos are.
satvikpendem
What is the recipe?
_joel
Doing the opposite of what they have been doing.
stronglikedan
1) success
2) ...
3) profit!
bigbuppo
Have you ever watched Shaq fall?
lenerdenator
Growth over a long period of time involves two things: consistency in vision, and willingness to take risks.
We do not have a market designed to reward these things, at least not for the likes of Microsoft. For them, it's far easier to simply cut people while collecting on their previous labor. Once the product of that previous labor is no longer as valuable, it can then simply be spun off or shut down permanently.
eightysixfour
I actually think this is the wrong diagnosis of this situation. The studios in Microsoft gaming appear to have been given a lot of room to take risks under previous leadership, build passion projects, etc. while letting big franchises sit on the side. Those things ended up being anywhere from abject failures to small successes - where some players and critics loved them - but most don't seem to be commercial successes.
In the meantime we haven't seen a new Quake, Fallout, Elder Scrolls, Perfect Dark, Fable, Banjo, Conker, or the myriad of other mainstream IP they owned in decades. Most of these franchises have lost a ton of value after sitting on the shelf for so long without releases.
tayo42
I'm confused, do people want endless sequels or not?
pjc50
The lesson of Nintendo is yes.
Note that this is different in gaming than film because of technical progression. But also Nintendo are very good at "same charm, familiar characters and plot, different feel".
mpyne
Nintendo does it the right way. I'm not at all afraid to say I want more Mario, Samus, Fox McCloud, Fire Emblem avatars and the like.
But they don't simply do roster updates, they bring those characters and worlds into new experiences, and they're willing to sit on good games rather than push out yearly new releases with almost nothing different compared to the previous iteration.
And the stability these franchises gives them, allows them to continue to make new IPs that may themselves grow into future tentpoles. So it's not just that they squander those successes, they are often trying to innovate into new things.
eightysixfour
People will tell you they do not want endless sequels. Sales numbers will mostly disagree with them.
zamadatix
It's like phones with smaller screens: they always sell poorly in comparison when available and then it's all you hear about online when it's not.
The usual tricks of "noise signals how many are really upset in absolute terms, not the relative popularity", "people will still make noise about what they don't like regardless if that's more popular overall", and "people who hate one attribute of the product can often still like it enough to buy overall".
runako
If Microsoft didn't want to use IP of existing studios, they should not have bought those studios. Why buy id if not to get more id?
Disney + Marvel offers a roadmap for extending existing IP. (Keep in mind that the Marvel acquisition was in 2009.)
Melatonic
Its Microsoft - why not both?
HDThoreaun
Obviously people want sequels, that's why hollywood makes so many of them.
lenerdenator
The thing is, every time you take a swing on one of those big IPs, you take a risk.
Sure, you can do well: Skyrim was a big step up from Oblivion, for example. But you can also screw things up (see: Halo), or fall into the trap that Valve has fallen into with Half-Life 3 where the expectations of the public can never be truly met.
I think what they want to do is make the next WoW. Low-risk, customer lock-in, people identifying themselves with their consumption of the IP to an almost ludicrous degree. You see that already in some ways with Fallout 76.
eightysixfour
> The thing is, every time you take a swing on one of those big IPs, you take a risk.
I think the entire content production industry, no matter the medium, is aware of the risk/reward of rerunning existing IP vs creating new IP. There's a reason we get retreads of retreads elsewhere, existing IP is lower risk, higher reward, pretty much always.
Halo is a good example - they fumbled with Infinite. It just wasn't very good. Yet the remake of Halo: Combat Evolved is getting a ton of attention from the fanbase and broader gaming community. If the next Halo is good, that fanbase will come back around.
> I think what they want to do is make the next WoW. Low-risk, customer lock-in, people identifying themselves with their consumption of the IP to an almost ludicrous degree. You see that already in some ways with Fallout 76.
This is what they now want from Mojang and Minecraft. Asha even called it out in her letter.
WorldMaker
> Yet the remake of Halo: Combat Evolved is getting a ton of attention from the fanbase and broader gaming community. If the next Halo is good, that fanbase will come back around.
The fanbase already has the Master Chief Collection. The remake seems doomed to fumble worse than MCC's notorious launch issues and it should be obvious to anyone looking at the project on paper. MCC was a team with ownership trying to learn the ins and outs of decades of work on the Slipspace engine to recreate each step of the Halo journey in an upgraded/consolidated form of its own engine. The new remake is a mostly outsourced team that basically owns nothing trying to recreate Halo mechanics in UE5 with the help of LLMs and other AI upscalers. That's nothing like what the real fans should want for the franchise. It reeks of corporate mismanagement misunderstanding what IP is for. It also reeks as a slap in the face for the hard work on the MCC (and yeah 5 and Infinite, fumbles and all).
throwaway27448
> I think what they want to do is make the next WoW. Low-risk, customer lock-in, people identifying themselves with their consumption of the IP to an almost ludicrous degree.
Sure, who doesn't want that? You don't get there by gutting the veterans who can rapidly iterate and know the technology and gaming landscape well. In my eye these kinds of layoffs are simply their giving up.
xboxnolifes
Making the next wow is not low risk. Making a largescale, successful MMO is probably the riskiest endeavor in video game development.
HumblyTossed
> consistency in vision, and willingness to take risks.
Agreed. If you are looking at a chart of performance and it's flat or slightly increasing year over year for a few years, you're not doing great. You need to see some dips which means you tried and failed. Without those, you won't ever see the big jumps.
reactordev
Microsoft’s Modus Operandi.
__patchbit__
Human labor plus AI tokens must double input capital on loop track output.
reactordev
Yeah, see slide 14 of the Microsoft Promise deck
dismalaf
In my experience, once organizations have enough history and size, they can't just pivot. Whatever happens within MS the organization makes it impossible for them to become anything other than what they've always been.
Their MO will always be EEE and they'll always (attempt to) abuse their monopoly power, while giving corpos and consumers just a glimmer of hope to keep them strung along...
Also any company they acquire will be gutted until it looks like the rest of the org.
tonyedgecombe
>Also any company they acquire will be gutted until it looks like the rest of the org.
I'm trying to think of a Microsoft acquisition which has been a success. Nothing comes to mind.
TylerE
They are unprofitable though. Profit margins of the entire Xbox division are less than just sticking the money in the bond market.
gruez
margins can't be compared to interest rates, because it's comparing revenues against costs. Comparing that with interest rates yields nonsensical results. If you want a proper comparison, you'd need return on capital, which requires you to figure out how much capital is in the gaming division.
TylerE
Why not?
If you input $1000 into process A which returns $20, and inputing $1000 into process B returns $30, you'd be insane to invest in process A and not process B, right?
gruez
That example only says 3% margin is better than 2% margin, not whether the hypothetical process yields better results than a bond paying 4% (or whatever). If the said process takes exactly 1 year to complete, and requires all the inputs to be provided upfront, then its margins can be directly compared to bond yields, but businesses are rarely that simple.
TylerE
It's not hypothetical. Xbox's margin last year was 3%.
gruez
See:
>If the said process takes exactly 1 year to complete, and requires all the inputs to be provided upfront, then its margins can be directly compared to bond yields, but businesses are rarely that simple.
Something tells me the xbox division isn't some sort of machine that takes in $x in costs at the start of the year and spits out $1.03x in revenue at end. Capital costs could be higher (eg. game takes 4 years to develop before you can sell it), or lower (eg. you pay foxconn $400 to make an xbox then immediately turn around and sell it to best buy for $450).
eightysixfour
There's no real evidence in here that the IDTech team or the "coders" were specifically let go. I'm not saying it didn't happen but the article is just raging at the idea of it happening without presenting any evidence of it.
I can't help but think the industry will be better off in a few years after this Xbox "restructure." That's a lot of knowledge and talent that's no longer stuck in 14 layers of middle management hell.
georgeecollins
Not the OP, but Scott Miller said "most if not all" coders at ID were laid off. https://www.gamesindustry.biz/xbox-layoffs-july-2026
I hope the industry will be in a better place in a few years. There is this recurring theme of big companies rolling up little developers and destroying their development culture.
thewebguyd
The industry could have been in a better place already if the DOJ hadn't allowed Microsoft to buy up all these studios.
I have near zero hope we'll see any meaningful antitrust action in the future either without a complete overhaul of the incentives in politics.
Xbox div's annual revenue is $23 billion. Its big enough to be its own company and sit upper-mid pack of the F500 on its own. It'd be the number 3 or 4th top gaming company globally, beating out Nintendo even. No reason for Microsoft to not have been broken up by now, let alone have been allowed to buy all the studios they did. Don't forget they also mislead the FTC to convince them to allow the Activision/Blizzard acquisition to go forward, and then once allowed laid off 1900 employees, mostly admin/HR & support, forcing it to integrate into Microsoft gaming and operate less independently.
rightbyte
I like the concept "Goomba fallacy", but it is a bit confusing since Goombas are exactly the same, where as board users are at least me and not me.
Edit: Keeping to SMB1 for simplicity.
toast0
> The industry could have been in a better place already if the DOJ hadn't allowed Microsoft to buy up all these studios.
Yes, but it's not the DOJ's job to tell Microsoft when they're lighting their money on fire. There's no unfair competition from this kind of thing. It wasn't any different when leather companies or old media would buy up studios and run themselves out of business.
Microsoft buying out studios could be anti-competitive, but Microsoft would have to not be Microsoft.
epolanski
When UK blocked the merger this very board flamed anti business old Europe.
superxpro12
One does wonder how many bots were involved in the flaming
eightysixfour
Yes, it was mentioned in the article. I just don't count a tweet from an "insider" as particularly strong evidence anymore.
CuriouslyC
Miller has a history with id, and has probably gotten numerous reports directly from boots on the ground in the company.
starkparker
Sounds like Digital Foundry's also looking into it, without much detail or confirmation: https://bsky.app/profile/dark1x.bsky.social/post/3mpyvnrbwds...
bix6
> There is this recurring theme of big companies rolling up little developers and destroying their development culture
Why are the little devs selling to the big companies in the first place then? If you’re crushing it as an Indie studio why wouldn’t you stay that way knowing how big tech acts?
munificent
Because big companies can spend way more on marketing than you.
If a big company decides to make a game very similar to yours, they can make theirs win by throwing more money into marketing than you can. Do you want them to spend that marketing budget on your competition or on you?
all2
Money. Someone made a lot of money selling IP and the skills of the team.
pjc50
The directors like money. And are probably beholden to their investors.
starkparker
We might not hear much on that until tomorrow, since most iDTech development was out of the Frankfurt studio. If they're shutting down Frankfurt, it'd be worth getting antennae out.
Looking at LinkedIn, I see mostly people from tech (design tooling, game AI, QA), art (modeling, mats, UI, character), design (levels, gameplay), and production roles in DFW being cut, but haven't seen engine roles or Frankfurt-based employees.
ZeniMax's QA team was notably unionized in 2023: https://cwa-union.org/news/releases/quality-assurance-worker...
pizza234
> There's no real evidence in here that the IDTech team or the "coders" were specifically let go
Scott Miller said it himself:
> Big day today at Id Software [...] today, Microsoft/XBOX decided half the team was deemed USELESS and needed to be let go [...] With literally the best of the best coders in the industry.
eightysixfour
I like Scott Miller but he doesn't work there and "insider" information after layoffs is almost always part of a PR game by one side or the other. Again, not saying he is wrong, just that a tweet from someone secondhand really doesn't do it for me as evidence anymore.
Toluhis
Thanks for reminding me to be more critical in my reception of news.
kibwen
What we know so far is just that id is "cutting a "significant number of staff":
https://bsky.app/profile/jasonschreier.bsky.social/post/3mpy...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Doom/comments/1up5pta/95_reportedly...
And I'm not sure I share your optimism that the industry will be better. It might not be worse, because it's possible that Microsoft is just so dysfunctional that id would never be allowed to produce another good game anyway. But the people losing their jobs here might be financially better off just leaving the game industry entirely. In particular, if the engine devs were totally cut, it's not clear to me that there's room for a studio to differentiate itself with a custom engine in the modern day.
Hikikomori
What's the tweet it references then?
chilmers
It's sad to watch corporate leadership try to fix problems with tactics that will only make them worse. MS bought successful studios who were successful precisely because their of unique technical and design culture. Now they plan to homogenise them into a content-creation blob that will churn out entries for existing franchises, using the same tools and approaches as the rest of the industry. Anything that was special or unique about those studios and their games will be lost, and the result will be a downward spiral of mediocrity that will cause players to lose interest even further.
sailorganymede
This is the thing that annoys me. They have the Fallout series hostage and moves like this sadden me because I can't expect the next game to particularly great when stuff like this happens.
klaussilveira
The only possible good Microsoft could do, in order to salvage their relationship with id software fans, would be to honor Carmack's legacy and release the RAGE engine (id tech 5) as open source. A lot of it was already released in the Doom 3 BFG release, might as well do the whole thing.
SurgeArrest
Microsoft EEE at its best: gobble up all game studios and then kill them.
Microsoft needs to be split, it should been split years ago, but now more than ever.
pfdietz
> at its best
This looks more like simple corporate incompetence. They never should have made those very expensive acquisitions.
thewebguyd
They should never have been allowed to make those acquisitions. Especially after they misled the FTC about Activision/Blizzard remaining independent and easily spun off again, and then immediately fired 1900 people afterwards forcing them to integrate more tightly into Microsoft gaming.
pfdietz
The FTC isn't there to stop corporations from making mistakes.
Subsequent events show concerns of monopolization were misplaced.
Goronmon
Microsoft EEE at its best: gobble up all game studios and then kill them.
"Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" isn't applicable at all in this context though?
tomnipotent
Of course not, but most folks poking at Microsoft are just borrowing their opinion from other people and regurgitating it for karma. I'm happy to crap on MS for bad decisions, but the constant "herp derp EEE" gets tired fast.
satvikpendem
EEE requires them to have succeeded to extinguish, not just be incompetent as to close them down.
LadyCailin
I don’t think that applies here. They don’t have a monopoly on gaming, there are major competitors in the space, from Sony and Nintendo, as well as Steam/Indie devs. Buying some studios might be anticompetitive in some minor ways, for instance if you’re a huge elder scrolls or fallout fan, but there’s just too many games out there for that to possibly be a viable strategy at a macroscopic level.
Catloafdev
RIP to the end of an era.
Was IdTech used outside of Id? Or was it just a Doom series thing as of recently?
lynndotpy
Absolutely, the first versions until idTech 5 were open source and a number of important engines, like Source, derive from it.
Wikipedia actually has a family tree that's broader than I remembered: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/85/Quake_-_...
The CoD series, Source games (Half Life, Portal, Left 4 Dead), Titanfall, etc.
wtfHN26
Thanks for the share ... never knew so many great games were built on idTech and engines derived from it.
Source being based idTech is a pleasant surprise.
WithinReason
It's also missing games, like American McGee's Alice.
nottorp
> the first versions until idTech 5 were open source and a number of important engines, like Source, derive from it
Huh? They were made open source when they were obsolete, Valve did license ID IP for the first Half Life but they paid for it. And that evolved indeed in Source.
vintermann
Very interesting tree. Today I learned that the engine we used in college classes, ACKNEX, actually wasn't an idtech derivative. I could have sworn.
markus_zhang
Machine games and Arkane studio use IDtech.
pavon
The relationship was different. When Id licensed an engine, they threw the code over the fence, and games that used it often heavily modified the engine for their purpose. In contrast Epic put a ton of effort into making the UT engine a polished development tool for creating games.
koteelok
Wolfenstein series and recent Indiana Jones game were made in IdTech.
pier25
Didn't love the gameplay but the Indiana Jones game looks absolutely phenomenal.
HeavyStorm
Wow, TIL Indiana was made with IdTech
ge96
Wolfenstein is great lore and art
sph
And ran like melted butter. What a great engine.
ge96
The newer stuff? That's what I think is great like New Colossus from a visual perspective
Hikikomori
Not sure if I'd call that outside Id as its all Zenimax.
lysace
This explains the connection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MachineGames#History
I wonder what's happening to MachineGames...
garciansmith
Skin Deep by Blendo games, which came out in 2025, used Id Tech 4 (despite its age). Super fun game with a ton of personality!
reactordev
IdTech 3-6 was used extensively by most FPS shooters back in the day.
Toluhis
Of all the firing decisions at Xbox this is the most shortsighted. Do you think or how has competing with the world on another UE work for you? games would run worse , feel worse. You should be encouraging more people to use Idtech.
ahmadyan
Also Unreal Engine is not free, it cost 5% of revenue, or $3 per game sold (assume $59.99 msrp). for small studio, ok, but for Microsoft's Scale? i don't know.
IIRC Doom Dark Age sold 3m? copies, so it would cost $10m in Unreal Engine fees. Doom Engine team likely cost more.
Microsoft problem is it is giving away games for free on gamepass, so it sees its engineers as cost center.
legitster
I have a friend who works at Ubisoft. Even 10+ years ago, she clearly saw the writing on the wall - the massive developer/publisher consolidation was going terribly:
- Every studio uses their own custom set of tools and development practices. The economies of scale of merging studios together just doesn't really exist.
- The functional difference between most engines for consumers at this point is largely meaningless. There are no order of magnitude gains like there used to be. Most of the engineering is on the cloud services architecture or anti-cheat.
- The median "developer" at a game studio is not actually a very technical person. They mostly just spend their days inputting content and assets with the available tools.
- The value of a AAA game is not how innovative the gameplay is but how much content they were able to stuff into the game.
- Nobody cares about "exclusives" anymore when 90% of AAAs have interchangeable gameplay with other AAAs.
- The cost to start a new studio is negligible compared to the cost of acquiring existing IP.
markus_zhang
IMO, people should stop chasing making AAA games or whatever nVidia pushed out. They should just build games instead of graphics demos that sometimes sold well.
They can stick to desktops 10 years ago, make smaller teams, and either build their own engine or use something that is not UE5.
ThatPlayer
Ten year old desktop users aren't exactly known for buying new games, especially at full price.
The average spending gaming hardware are the consoles. No one is going to start building a game targeting a Playstation 4 today, they'll target the 5 year old PS5.
falcor84
> Yet today, Microsoft/XBOX decided half the team was deemed USELESS and needed to be let go
I feel that this is an incredibly unfair and demeaning take both towards Microsoft and towards the people being fired. As I see it, getting fired is just like being dumped by a romantic partner. It typically says very little about your value as an individual, and almost everything about their current situation and how the relationship with you fits into their future plans and the other opportunities available to them.
dymk
It’s nothing like a romantic relationship, and it does say something about msft: they failed at planning and managing company resources, and as a result fired a bunch of people
falcor84
It sounds like you're fully agreeing with me that it has pretty much nothing to do with the value of the employees and essentially everything with how the employees no longer fit the company's plans.
MisterTea
Nice downplay. This is getting dumped by a romantic partner who supported you by paying for your rent, food and other needs/wants.
lenerdenator
The problem with the romantic partner analogy is that when things ended with my ex, I didn't lose my career continuity, health insurance and income stream that goes to pay my rent.
Corporate culture spent the last fifty years convincing the working public that it was important to identify with your job, career, and most importantly, your employer. That's how you get the most out of a worker. If they identify themselves as - just as examples - "parent" or "spouse" first, those priorities can get in the way of their value creation for you.
The employer can, of course, drop you as an employee pretty much at-will. You'll be left with shame, disillusionment, and potential financial setbacks, but they'll have accumulated the value from your best efforts.
ButlerianJihad
> didn't lose my career continuity, health insurance and income stream that goes to pay my rent.
But that is basically the minimum set of consequences for any homemaker or non-breadwinner when a marriage fails.
Think about women through the centuries, who’ve been faced with basically homelessness and poverty, and the full responsibility to all their children, if they divorced or separated.
And then it becomes crystal clear why many people cling to suboptimal and abusive relationships, because really, we need one another.
lenerdenator
At least in today's world, there are things like alimony that are supposed to go to the prevention of that issue. It's not perfect, but it's at least something.
There's also an increase in the number of women who are able to independently support themselves.
People are also less likely to get married now for that exact reason.
If there were some sort of alimony for employment, even if just for a year, and a public health insurance option to fall back on, you probably don't see that much outrage from the people who have lost their jobs. But then, you'd also, at least in the minds of certain employers, see less willingness on the behalf of employees to throw their whole lives into the production of value for the business, and I think that's part of why you don't see guaranteed severance and public health insurance in the US.
microflash
It's Nokia all over again: Having all ingredients for success and yet stubbornly not succeeding.
notnullorvoid
I'm going to choose to look at this in a positive light. In the long term this talent will feed into more indie games and studios, and perhaps studios will be less inclined to get acquired by Microsoft and other big orgs going forward.
Much of the gaming industry outside the indie space has stagnated, making sequels that don't offer much outside of slight increases to graphical fidelity and the odd thematic switch.
pier25
Looks like Microsoft is desperate for more cash to burn on AI and making drastic decisions like this.
Sure the Xbox division wasn't doing amazing but still had $24B of revenue in 2025. For reference PlayStation made $30B that same year.
lousken
I am sure even AI wouldn't f** up lay offs this badly, this is mind boggling. Can we replace the management with AI please?
kpeek0
This doesn't seem to be correct. Its amazing how one tweet can go so broad even when its not accurate. Tiago Sousa, Billy Khan, Phillip Hammer, Dominik Lazarek all seem like they are still at Id
trencedamp
Michael Maynard's tweet reads like Trump stuff. iD are obviously monumentally important in game history but I disagree with his points that the Doom, doom eternal and doom dark ages are the best fps games ever made. Doom was revolutionary, but are we really going to say the other two are up there? I don't think they'd even be in my top twenty.
I get that he's angry and hurt and defending his colleagues but telling me doom dark ages is better than half-life 2 is just picking a fight
koteelok
No more DOOM games (((
owlninja
Or future releases will just use Unreal Engine or something pre-existing :(
koteelok
They were 100% working on the next game with idTech. Now the next release will for sure be delayed by a couple of years.
Fuck Microsoft.
sph
The new one is 67% off on Steam. Just got it myself
storus
One could have anticipated XBox getting slowly destroyed by appointing a young clueless outsider as its boss.
aquova
I think this is more discovering the rot left from the previous leadership who sat around for years and years on their bad decisions, and then using the young clueless outsider as the face.
CuriouslyC
Game devs have been heavily unionizing lately, including Blizzard and WotC. I wonder how long long it takes before we have a union game dev studio basically mutiny and completely disregard the instructions of the corporate suits, and force the choice of either shuttering the studio completely or caving to the workers.
jasonlotito
Yesterday.
"In France, Arkane's management is beginning required consultation with its Works Council to review potential strategic options."
georgemcbay
Remember when Satya Nadella and Bobby Kotick got up in court and told everyone how all these giant Xbox mergers would be good for the consumer and went after Lina Khan for suggesting that maybe that wasn't the case?
Who woulda thunk they were full of crap...? (besides everyone who didn't have a financial stake in the deal)
officeplant
Rip one of modern gamings best performing engines on older hardware (going by my experiences)
Can't wait for more terrible UE5 games.
stego-tech
This hurts, in a very specific way. Those coders are legendary wizards of the craft, understanding engine design and systems architecture in a way nobody else in the industry does. This is a team that could get 200fps+ in their games with RT on and no dynamic reconstruction or upscaling to be had, at a time when everyone else mandated such shortcuts to have even 30-45fps at a similar resolution. They did all this while also working closely with the actual game designers, to make sure the tech was usable instead of obfuscatory or hindering to production.
The fact Microsoft just fired them all, at a time when their remaining studios desperately need help with their aging, shitty engines? I can’t think of a better indicator that they haven’t a fucking clue about what they’re doing, here.
ironman1478
Just to play devils advocate, was all of that worth it? There are equally fun or more fun indie games that don't have great graphics, but the gameplay is astounding. DUSK is an example of this.
I love that these teams are pushing boundaries of technology, but it also points to an issue with modern game AAA development. It's expensive to make these beautiful games and it's not like they are more enjoyable than games made cheaper.
Cort3z
Don’t sell you company to Microsoft then
epolanski
AB was publicly traded and the majority of shareholders voted yes.
0xWTF
Interestingly, Id was led by John Carmack, who was also a big fan of VR. And Microsoft killed the AR/VR/MR teams a year ago.
So, I'm guessing internally there were some leadership hopes that IdTech would help support IVAS and related professional AR systems and when those failed to be adopted at scale, IdTech lost a key sponsor. I'm guessing it's been a rough year of internal advocacy since.
DarkNova6
Carmack left id waaay before Microsoft has acquired id (transitively by acquiring Zenimax/Bethesda)
bathtub365
Carmack hasn’t worked at id for 13 years
bcjdjsndon
Carmack had left id by the time he got into vr/at, iirc they snagged him from a rocket company?
azornathogron
Armadillo Aerospace was Carmack's own rocket company.
And tbh I'm not sure it was ever a plausible contender for commercial success, more like Carmack wanted to play with rockets. But that might be unfair; I would happily accept a correction.
neko_ranger
Either John or John should buy back the Id Software name
markus_zhang
I don’t think they are interested or have the $$$. It probably worths like a billion?
sowbug
Probably a good way to become a millionaire, in the Branson sense of the word.
delduca
Next: Blizzard
datakan
Considering how bad Blizzard has gotten the last 10 or so years, I would expect a bloodbath there. I don't know how they avoid it.
lenerdenator
Blizzard's golden goose is WoW, and WoW is an ideal IP for a software company: you have people who have been playing it for two decades who will continue to pay a subscription no matter what. The hard work was done decades ago. id, on the other hand, has to keep making better and better new games every couple of years, and each one is a risk.
There's a reason game companies want to move towards the digital-only subscription model, and Xbox has been going that way for some time. As "bad" as Blizzard is, it's got the right model. That's what they care about, not about workplace culture or innovation.
tyfon
For me they are killing the goose.
WoW has become quite soulless after the changes where everyone gets the same end game equipment but you have to grind upgrade currency to improve it.
My wife and I used to play quite a bit but it doesn't really engage anymore. Perhaps we are getting too old, but we should be in the correct customer segment (mid 40 years old).
Now I have spun up a local wotlk server with player bots powered by ollama which is actually a bit fun again.
kcb
Why? What unsuccessful game does Blizzard have?
datakan
All of them. Diablo is dead. They can't capitalize on StarCraft. All they have left with WoW is micro transactions for old users. Overwatch has been a disaster for years. Blizzard hasn't had a win in a very long time.
crims0n
Diablo is currently in a bit of a resurgence, the latest expansion was quite good.
anthonypasq
lol
Someone1234
Blizzard is such a shell now, that I doubt we'd notice.
CuriouslyC
A big chunks of Blizzard has already pre-emptively unionized for this exact reason.
oreally
I think it's their first big test of a layoff? Am interested to see how this plays out.
In any case, WoW has been stagnating for quite some time even before the merger. The devs act as though everything is slow because it needs to be. Classic+ could've been much better.
xienze
Do you think having a union means the entire organization can't get shitcanned? Ask all those auto workers whose jobs got shipped to Mexico over the years how much being unionized helped.
moogly
On the same day they release the new Dark Ages DLC. The game industry continues to be brutal.
hbn
DOOM was always intended to be brutal, but not like this
dwroberts
Fast forward a few years “where did all our institutional knowledge about performance and rendering go??”
So utterly predictable it’s infuriating
colechristensen
why wouldn't they just sell it?
I'm deeply opposed to game distribution companies (console makers) being allowed to acquire game studios.
In the same way that theaters and streaming services shouldn't be allowed to do acquisitions.
Disney owning whatever ridiculous proportion of media by buying everything serves nobody's best interest.
mrweasel
> why wouldn't they just sell it?
Because someone who cares might buy the brand and do something good with it and be a competitor. ID Software is still a strong brand, and it the hands of another gaming studio it might pose a threat.
kreco
> why wouldn't they just sell it?
Serious question, is there any kind of entities that can be owned, but not "dismantled", if you don't want it you need to try to sell or make it independant.
Would there be any chance to make it a thing when a company is bought?
jayd16
It's fairly common for a studio to buy its independence and keep the team intact. You do need fresh money to make it worthwhile and give the new studio runway.
There's also the case where new teams can self organize to form new studios in the aftermath. That's also a factor on whether it makes sense to pay for the previous name or game license, or simply start over.
wmf
I get the impression European companies are like this. In general if a company can't be reorganized/dismantled that makes it worth so little (or negative) that no one will acquire it.
colechristensen
You can put various kinds of "poison pill" in the shareholder rights agreements which are binding contracts on both the company and its shareholders in response to events.
You can also make all sort of post acquisition agreements.
These usually take the form of making stock available at steep discounts in response to actions e.g. in the event of a 20% layoff any employee from the time of acquisition can purchase stock at $0.10 a share, any one laid off will get a million dollars severance, if acquirer shuts down the studio the original founders have the right to re-acquire all IP and trademarks for $1 -- those sorts of things.
This isn't a specific kind of entity, any business entity can have Shareholder Rights Agreements. It's a bit of a game to get the terms right so everything is in good faith and agreeable.
ixwt
Likely one of two reasons, probably both:
1. Tax write off.
2. Acquiring a competitor, and then closing them down is a way to decrease competiton.
ranger_danger
q3dm17 for life.
amlib
Upon reading your comment I just booted quake3 in q3dm17 nightmare mode and immediately started having a blast. Was about to win the match but a bot took both the rail gun and the quad damage, it was a blood bath.
whacked_new
q3dm17 in the browser... what a time to be alive
genxy
My favorite was rail brushing people off during pad jumps. Because they died from hitting the level box, they would get a -1. At work we had a match where every other player had a negative score. That aid, they were good sports about it and I didn't do it all the time.
markus_zhang
I was thinking, is that the space hopping map? Because I didn’t play much MP back in the day but that map was a blast.
Checked online and indeed that’s the one! I wonder what is the biggest online community nowadays that I can play MP with.
jaffa2
Who designed that map?
Anyone know?
Did it appear First in quake or quake III?
starkparker
I've seen Brandon James (KillMe) credited in multiple places.[1][2] James left iD mid-development of Quake 3, so the rest of the level design team likely also contributed after that point.[3]
1: https://www.quora.com/Quake-series-Who-was-the-level-designe...
2: https://www.shacknews.com/article/101156/rocket-jump-quake-a...
3: https://www.shacknews.com/article/181/more-on-bjames-id-depa...
michaelsbradley
First appeared in Quake 3 Arena’s public demo
SurajMishra
Really a sad day. DOOM was fantastic.
feelamee
I don't really understand. Id Software is owned by Microsoft? Why Microsoft can laying off employees of Id Software?
starkparker
ZeniMax, the parent holding company of Bethesda Softworks/Bethesda Games, bought iD in 2009.[1] Microsoft bought ZeniMax for $7.5B in 2020 and assigned it to the Xbox division.[2] ZeniMax's board was subsequently dissolved, so it's entirely Microsoft.[3]
1: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/game-platforms/bethesda-parent...
2: https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2020/09/21/welcoming-bethesda-to...
3: https://www.gamespot.com/articles/zenimax-board-of-directors...
genxy
If that isn't a perfect piece of antitrust evidence, how crazy is it that MS can reach across a whole industry and buy the company that bought the company that defined the games industry, with Carmack playing revenge of the nerds boy genius. Everything about it is perfect for a locally produced drama somewhere in eastern europe.
advisedwang
Yes. When ZeniMax owns Id, and Microsoft owns ZeniMax.
iamleppert
They are moving most of their development to India, where it's pretty easy to find bottom-dollar UE5 dev shops.
pipes
Do you have a source for this ?
tayo42
Do they make good games though? Idk if game dev is like corporate software where it's already uncreative crap no one really is thrilled about.
hbn
The rebooted Doom trilogy is more or less the only FPS games I've ever particularly enjoyed
isityettime
A lot of games are, including some of the most popular franchises. Sequel mills often become like this
CrimsonCape
Looking at Asha Sharma's track record of having no experience in anything related to gaming, don't color me surprised when in 6 months the foisted narrative will be 'well, do we even need an Xbox?'
bathtub365
Phil Spencer had already put it in the ditch by the time she took over. “Everything is an Xbox” was a joke of a strategy, spending $70 billion on a company with a weak slate in the Activision purchase
datakan
I'm not sure thats all on Phil. He was told they needed 30% profit margins or else. He was grasping and trying to make that happen when they only had 12% (market average was something like 10). This really feels like Phil was setup to take a fall and Asha is swooping in to either be a hero or sell it all off so Microsoft can focus on AI.
bathtub365
That’s a fair point. I do think Game Pass was a major strategic misstep, but I assume they were also pushed to show regular recurring revenue which obviously flies in the face of a traditional game publisher’s revenue pattern.
danjl
Perhaps also a bit of ageism. Always hard to prove. Often implicit.
tibbydudeza
Unreal Engine has become a commodity, and it is easier to recruit people with experience - even CD Projekt Red gave up.
The only major studios doing their own thing is Rockstar and Bethesda.
I would not include Cloud Imperium here because they are forever in a beta state with no clear ship date in the future for their two games.
hbn
> The only major studios doing their own thing is Rockstar and Bethesda.
Don't forget Nintendo. It's pretty damn impressive what they managed to pull off on the Switch with more or less circa-2015 Android hardware. Mario Odyssey looks beautiful and runs at a mostly stable 60fps.
pipes
Technology advances and platform variation were a key part of why games where so exciting. It feels like that period is now over, it is difficult to get excited any of it now. The whole industry just seems stale and corporate. Or maybe I'm just old.
What's really odd is it is now easier than ever to create games but at the same time it feels like we won't see revolutionary games like doom, quake, Goldeneye or half life ever again. These were created by small teams that could inject their personality into them.
My other theory is game creation was previously so hard, it required genius level iq teams to do it so we quite regularly got mind blowingly amazing games. Now we get cut scenes instead.
to11mtm
> The only major studios doing their own thing is Rockstar and Bethesda.
Is Ubisoft's Anvil still alive or is it just in an unknown status after they cancelled a few upcoming titles?
That said, Capcom is still doing their own thing via RE Engine...
Not sure about any others...
sgt
I actually started my game now in LÖVE 2d.
bathtub365
Also IO Interactive, Guerrilla Games, Santa Monica Studio
FrustratedMonky
Too bad they didn't double down and sell the Id Tech Engine and be a competitor to UE. Instead of folding.
rwq-askh
Naturally, Asha Sharma was in AI before this gig so expect slop games made in India in the future.
I never thought I'd want Steve Ballmer back. Things can always get worse.
bossyTeacher
When people think that tech is a meritocracy and being good means you won't be laid off, show them this.
gigatexal
What does this mean for the future of Doom?!! I hate this. Maybe we should have been sounding such an alarm when Microsoft was buying everyone.
2OEH8eoCRo0
$2.93 trillion market cap....layoffs
Bizarre incentives we have created
epolanski
Their gaming division is not doing well.
Those are de facto separate organizations.
HDThoreaun
msft gaming likely has a negative market cap
lain98
I was fired by microsoft last year, Satya said the layoff was not due to performance reasons and he refused to elaborate what it was. In the job market I had to explain at every interview why I was laid off. People still ask me why I left MS to work at my current less prestigious company when the learn I used to work there and I have to sheepishly repeat the lie I have memorised to make them go away.
Even when I was at MS I saw a culture of always being in firing and hiring mode. They fired people who were perfectly good at their jobs and hired people who needed to be trained and needed higher salaries.
Sorry Satya. I just can't trust MS with my career anymore and I dissuade more people from going there everyday. ¯\(ツ)/¯
markus_zhang
I also worked in a public company that bought a lot of companies during the pandemic and had to sell or shut them down in the wake of 2024.
My cynical take is that a lot of VC/fund bros need their cash during the pandemic and they saw a high in the market so installed their friends to buy those assets. Scroll forward 5, 6 years, they now do the reverse to pump up stock prices of those parent companies and win big again.
It has nothing to do with the parent companies themselves. They are just a tool to pump and dump.
bellowsgulch
The id Tech engine family is perhaps one of the greatest engine families in the industry, and this move tells me there is no technical leadership at Microsoft. We already knew there was no financial leadership.
So the question is, what's left? Because there's no gameplay leadership either, and that's the whole fucking point.
moralestapia
The LinkedIn screenshot there is pathetic.
"I made a good game in 2016. I was paid for that; it was literally my job. Ten years later, they let me go." Oh no, boo hoo.
Also, the classic "everything is good when they pay me; when they stop paying me, they're evil." Are they not aware of how vile that makes them look?
There's an anecdote about Stalin (or someone else, maybe it's made up) where he plucks a chicken's feathers, and the thing is convulsing in pain. Then he offers it a handful of corn, and it starts eating from his hand.
A man should strive to be better than an animal.
allthetime
10 years of employment with a fat salary. Sounds horrible
bigbuppo
What's the development cycle of a major game? If someone worked on multiple games from start to finish for a studio, how many games would they have completed in a ten year span? Do game studios allow developers to talk about anything and eveyrthing they're working on in public or do they have them work under non-disclosure agreements?
moralestapia
Who cares about any of that? He was being paid. It was not a charity, it was work.
Companies don't owe you anything. (And you don't owe them anything, either.)
Work is a temporary agreement to provide services in exchange for money. That's it. Understand how the world works.
onraglanroad
People who understand society care about it. When you employ someone you take on a certain responsibility. You can't negate that by pretending that you're in an equal power relationship.
That's why we have workers' rights.
someguynamedq
Society determines what "shoulds" turn into "musts," and currently our society does not have any "must" for general cultural or social good. Only fiduciary responsibility. That's the structural cause here and should be the focus of attention
bigbuppo
Well I hope you get exactly what you want.
someguynamedq
understand != want
akramachamarei
Although there are things to criticize in the Linkedin post, the moralization ego defense mechanism is not the one it employed.
HeavyStorm
What the fuck
zuzululu
im not a gamer but looking at this purely from the headlines and reactions :
- games like other forms of media have become mixed with political messagings that pre-dominantly hetrosexual male demographic rejected understandably
- games have become far too expensive and poor lasting. i remember games like unreal tournament, quake arena, counter strike 1.3, starcraft had very lasting user base long after their release, now it seems like game companies shut down multiplayer and stop community mods
So you make a product that your target audience doesn't want and raised the prices and lot of smaller studios and indie developers are filling that gap that large studios have self sabotaged by associating with (ex. Sweet Baby, GaymerX, Black Girl Gamers) that have led to flagship titles to complete ruin (ex. Concord)
Capricorn2481
First of all, we're talking about Doom here. I doubt Doom is too alienating for heterosexual audiences. Doesn't that seem like an extremely inorganic segue into identity politics?
Secondly, The "go woke or broke" thing has been a Schrodinger's mantra used by grifters to sell outrage. Everything is woke until it succeeds, and then suddenly it was always predetermined to succeed. The market, on the whole, doesn't seem to care about or pay attention to these things as much as you imply. The worst examples, like Concord, are games that are shit across the board and compete in really crowded markets. The "Sweet baby" watch group on steam flagged Elden Ring, for christsake. If anything, the indie games are even more woke.
But there is certainly a loud minority that will insist this is a massive threat to the industry. I for one cannot wait until people learn how to criticize games again. It's unfortunate good game criticism is being overtaken by to a crowd of tourists that flatten game quality to a checklist of anti woke signifiers. It sucks. But it mostly affects internet comments.
I think the fact that you are not a gamer but the first thing you think of when you imagine what gamers care about is Sweet Baby Inc says more about the content you consume.
iepathos
Wow, that tweet claiming the Doom series is the best first person action game in the entire industry is crazy. That dev has to be completely disconnected from the rest of the game industry or delusional. No stats support that claim at all. Not player count, not sales, not reviews, nothing. The first Doom was certainly industry defining, but it and its sequels have never been considered the best by anyone except apparently this dev. If they were the best, they probably wouldn't be getting laid off right now.
parasti
They worked on the reboot games which are considered widely successful relative to other games released around the same time.
iepathos
Sure, the tweet was about their releases since 2016 when I assume this particular dev was involved, not the original release. To be clear, I'm not saying their games aren't good or even that they didn't have some success. 20 million in sales for their entire franchise isn't bad, it isn't the 500 million in sales we see from CoD or Battlefield, but it isn't bad. I actually liked the games, but claiming they are the "BEST GAMES EVER!" and having the gall to mention Google where no Google results ever show them as the best is where I have an issue. We don't need to spread misinformation like that and if the dev actually believes this I can only assume they live in a bubble.
I think we'll see stuff like this continue to happen over time. As a game company, having your own engine means that you have to be able to cultivate internal expertise in your tooling. Your employees will know this and could do bad things like ask for more money because they know that replacing them would significantly hurt productivity. Meanwhile, laying off your whole engine team and switching to UE5 means that you can get access to tons of low-wage contractors who know UE5. You can hire a bunch of them when you start a game project and then lay them all off when it's finished, and rinse and repeat as necessary. It lets you treat your employees as a replaceable commodity that can be scaled up and down as it makes monetary sense rather than a cohesive team of skilled artisans.