Layoffs at id Software Leave id Tech Engine in the Hands of a Single Engineer

On July 9, 2026, Microsoft carried out the largest workforce restructuring in Xbox history, cutting 136 of id Software's roughly 180 employees, about three quarters of the team. The hardest hit was the division behind the studio's in-house id Tech engine, which has powered the Doom series for years and is licensed out to other studios, including Machine Games.

The Scale of the Cuts at id Software

The reduction affected half the staff at the studio known for Doom, Quake and Wolfenstein. According to Kotaku and other gaming outlets, the US team responsible for developing the id Tech engine was left with literally one person after the layoffs. A source close to the studio said that without the engineers who lost their jobs, the institutional knowledge needed to keep patching the engine has effectively ceased to exist.

The institutional knowledge just vanished, id Tech as a technology is probably dead for good - anonymous source close to id Software, quoted by Kotaku

The one exception is id Software's Frankfurt office, where some of the engineers working on the engine were not laid off, most likely because German labor law makes this kind of cut significantly harder to carry out. As a result, Xbox may end up shifting the burden of maintaining id Tech onto the team in Germany.

Mixed Signals from Xbox

Despite effectively dismantling the engineering team, sources close to Xbox's plans say Microsoft still intends to use the id Tech engine in future titles. Machine Games continues to work on a modified version of the engine, known as Motor, which powered Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. This gap between Microsoft's stated plans and the reality of its staffing has sparked a wave of commentary from players and developers alike.

Before the layoffs, id Software had pitched Xbox several concepts for new games, including a reboot of the Perfect Dark series, a title set in a cyberpunk world reminiscent of the John Wick franchise, and a cooperative entry in the Doom series. All of these proposals were cancelled following the mass cuts.

Copilot Instead of Engineers

Polish outlet gry-online.pl described the gaming community's reaction, with players sarcastically noting that if Microsoft wants to keep using the engine without an engineering team, artificial intelligence will have to take over code maintenance. The most repeated joke in the comments is that from now on the engine will be maintained by an intern using Copilot, Microsoft's AI coding assistant.

The joke touches a sore spot in the broader debate over the role of AI assistants in maintaining complex, decades-old engine code. id Tech is a technology that has been developed for decades, with layers of dependencies and optimizations that are hard to reconstruct without direct knowledge from its original authors. Critics point out that even today's best code generation and refactoring tools cannot replace the experience of the engineers who built the engine from the ground up.

What This Means for the Gaming Industry

The situation at id Software fits into a broader trend across the gaming industry, where major publishers are cutting employment costs while betting that AI tools will let them maintain production pace at a lower cost. For Polish development studios that work with Western publishers or rely on licensed engines, the id Tech case illustrates the risk of depending on technology whose creators can be wiped out at any moment by the owner's business decisions.

Microsoft has not officially commented on its plans for id Tech's future or on how it intends to maintain the engine with such a reduced team. The fate of upcoming games built on the technology, including future Doom installments, remains unclear.

Sources: gry-online.pl (gry-online.pl), TheGamer (thegamer.com), Wolfs Gaming Blog (wolfsgamingblog.com)