Doom Dev Says Microsoft 'Fundamentally Doesn't Understand Art' After id Software Layoffs

“id Was the People”

Chris Hays has been at id Software since 2010. He worked through the studio’s remarkable second act, which included Doom 2016, Doom Eternal, and Doom: The Dark Ages. So when Hays sat down with Andre Peschke on the podcast Auf ein Bier and started talking about what Microsoft’s July layoffs actually mean for the studio he has spent 16 years helping build, his words carried weight.

“They fundamentally don’t understand art,” Hays said of Microsoft and Xbox, as reported by IGN. That line alone is striking. But the fuller picture he painted is, if anything, more sobering.

“It’s hard to make a game that is AAA, that’s like we’ve done before, with half the people,” Hays said. “And by hard, I mean impossible.”

What the Numbers Actually Mean

The July cuts removed 136 staff from id Software. When the studio issued a statement to IGN on July 10, it tried to put that in context, noting the restructuring left id at “about the same size we were when making Doom 2016” and that it still had “the crew we need to build the games and tech we’re known for.”

Hays pushed back on that framing directly. He said the studio now actually houses fewer staff than worked on Doom 2016, not the same number. And the games id made after that, Doom Eternal and Doom: The Dark Ages, were built with roughly twice as many people.

“We made bigger and better games, but that’s with twice as many people as we had,” Hays told Peschke. “So, we have fewer than we had before. So, are we going to make something equivalent to a single-player Xbox 360 game? Because that’s the size of the studio we have.”

That is a direct challenge to the official messaging. The math is simple, and Hays did not pretend otherwise.

Talking Points and Unrest

Hays also addressed the internal communications that followed the cuts, describing a messaging environment tightly managed from above. “Studio management is given talking points on things that are allowed to be said and what is not allowed to be said,” he said, according to IGN.

The goal, in his reading, was containment. Microsoft does not want talented people walking out the door after watching colleagues get laid off. “They don’t want unrest,” Hays said. “At the end of the day, most of it was just trying to tell us that, ‘Oh, no, everything is fine. Things will be OK.’”

He also flagged that entire departments and disciplines were lost in the cuts. “There are entire departments that are gutted that you need, entire disciplines that are gone,” he said. No new plan for how the studio moves forward has been shared with remaining staff, at least as of when Hays spoke. “If they’ve got some kind of new plan for how this is going to work, that hasn’t been told; we don’t know what that is.”

The Harder Point

Beyond the logistics of headcount, Hays made an argument about identity. id Software’s reputation, he said, was not a brand or a technology stack. It was the specific people who showed up and the relationships they built over years.

“We’re not the same id. We’re half the same id. id was the people. What made us special was the people and the relationships we have.”

id reclaimed its standing as a premier first-person shooter studio with Doom 2016 and followed it with two more critically regarded entries. That run took a decade and a particular group of people working together. Hays is not saying the studio is finished. He is saying that the thing Microsoft apparently does not grasp is that you cannot cut half a creative team and reassure the other half that nothing important has changed.