Xbox Cut id Software Back to Its Doom 2016 Size

A Texas WARN notice lists 136 jobs cut at id Software, the Doom and Quake studio in Richardson. Xbox had just opened a reset of about 3,200 roles across its games group. Doom: The Dark Ages expansion Revelations shipped the next day.

Early accounts put the hit near half the studio. The state filing is the count that stuck. Bethesda had already told staff it would plan around its strongest franchises, Doom and Quake among them, while the new union still had no first contract.

A Texas WARN Notice Lists 136 id Software Jobs

The Texas Workforce Commission sent the notice on request. It names Xbox subsidiary ZeniMax Media as the employer of record for the Texas cuts. id Software took the bulk of that list. Bethesda Game Studios in Austin took the rest.

THE TEXAS WARN COUNT

Those Texas plant closure and layoff notices are how a mass cut becomes a public record. Twelve people on the Texas list were outside the union. Everyone else on it was CWA.

Anonymous accounts also said the QA group was torn up. A laid-off worker wrote on LinkedIn that the studio was being broken up for another reorganization of assets. The notice does not break jobs out by department, so those claims sit beside the filing rather than inside it.

Bethesda Shifted Its Plan Onto Doom and Quake

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma told staff on July 6, 2026, that the company was beginning the most significant restructure in Xbox history. In the memo posted to Xbox Wire, she said she had decided to reduce our team by approximately 3,200 throughout FY27, with about 1,600 role cuts that day.

Sharma wrote that Xbox was operating at margins 3 to 10 times lower than comparable platform and publishing businesses. She said the company had bet on Game Pass, multi-platform games, and a broader slate, and that those bets did not grow as expected. In a typical year, she wrote, Xbox lost 64 cents for every dollar it invested in the studio push.

Compulsion Games and Double Fine were set to leave as independents. Ninja Theory and Undead Labs were moving to new owners. Arkane in France opened a works-council consultation. Sharma said none of Xbox’s publicly announced in-house games were being cancelled as part of the cuts.

Bethesda president Jill Braff sent her own note the same week. “To best position Bethesda for future growth, we are shifting from a planning model primarily centered on what’s next for each independent studio to one that focuses on our strongest franchises and determining the content roadmap that best serves our players and Bethesda as a whole,” she wrote to staff.

A person familiar with that plan said the franchises in the new stack were Fallout, The Elder Scrolls, Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake. No ZeniMax studio was marked for closure. The Doom studio still lost 136 jobs on the Texas paper.

Sharma also said some groups had as many as 14 layers of management, and that platform teams were 40 percent larger than at the start of the hardware generation even as the player base and playtime fell. She wanted a flatter shop built around makers. id Software would soon use that same word about itself, after the cuts.

The December Union Vote Had No First Contract

On December 12, 2025, a strong majority of id Software workers voted for the Communications Workers of America. CWA said the 165 workers will be members of CWA Local 6215 in Richardson. Microsoft recognized the unit under its labor principles.

When those cards were signed, the studio had 185 people on staff. Quality assurance at the company had already unionized with the same local in 2023. Producer Andrew Willis, who sat on the organizing committee, tied the vote to control over the work and to a career that lasted longer than a quarter.

The union is a way for us, the developers, to take back control of the industry we love and to ensure that it delivers high-quality products from high-quality workers who have health benefits and longevity beyond quarterly profits.

Andrew Willis, id Software producer and CWA Local 6215 organizing committee member, CWA announcement

Local 6215 president Ron Swaggerty said the local wanted a contract that matched the skill on Doom and Quake. Lead services programmer Chris Hays said remote work was a health and access need, not a perk. The unit was still at the table in July. There was no ratified contract, and so no contract clause on advance notice or recall.

FROM THE UNION VOTE TO THE TEXAS CUTS

1. December 12, 2025: id Software workers vote in CWA Local 6215, a 165-person wall-to-wall unit Microsoft recognizes.
2. July 6, 2026: Sharma announces about 3,200 Xbox role cuts through FY27, about 1,600 of them that day.
3. July 7, 2026: Revelations launches. The Texas notice lists 136 id Software jobs and 22 in Austin, 146 of them CWA.
4. July 10, 2026: id Software says the remaining team is about the size it was when making Doom (2016).
5. July 15, 2026: CWA files an unfair labor practice charge in Fort Worth and holds Save Our Devs rallies.

CWA president Claude Cummings Jr. said Microsoft had agreed to respect organizing rights when it wanted to grow the games group. He said the July cuts “decimated the teams at id Software, Bethesda Game Studios, and ZeniMax Online Studios,” and that weaker teams would mean longer waits and worse games.

District 2-13 vice president Mike Davis said the union would take legal and contract action and demand immediate bargaining over fair severance, vendor-contract decisions, placement into open roles, and recall rights. That is the gap a first contract would have closed. Without it, those items are a fight after the fact.

WHAT CWA SAYS IT WILL BARGAIN

• Severance: Pay and terms for people already off the roster, not a quiet exit.
• Open roles: Placement so qualified laid-off staff can move into jobs Xbox still has posted.
• Recall rights: A path back if the studio hires again for Doom, Quake, or id Tech.
• Vendor work: A say when contractors replace work the unit used to do.

CWA said that week it represented more than 3,500 video game workers at Microsoft. OneBGS, the Bethesda Game Studios unit, told members the company had cut more than 440 union roles across Bethesda Game Studios, ZeniMax Online Studios, id Software, quality assurance, and corporate groups. Microsoft’s public line stayed on the Xbox-wide 3,200 figure.

id Software Says the Crew Matches Doom 2016

For several days the studio said nothing while posts claimed most of the coders were gone and that id Tech might have one person left in Texas. On July 10, 2026, the official account posted a short note.

A message from id pic.twitter.com/4i4YyjB3xc

— id Software (@idSoftware) July 10, 2026

The studio thanked people for the support, said the cuts were spread across teams, and said it still had the crew to build the games and tech it is known for. “The team today is about the same size we were when making Doom (2016),” it wrote. It also said it had always been a flat studio where everyone is a maker, and that it would keep that setup. It closed by pointing to QuakeCon in August.

That Doom (2016) line is the company’s defense and the cut’s shape. The reboot was a smaller-team hit. The Dark Ages era was a larger one. Xbox’s own memo wanted fewer layers and more makers. id Software answered with the headcount of a ten-year-old production, not with a new game announcement.

Xbox separately said dozens of people still work on id Tech across multiple sites, and that claims of a single engineer left in Texas were wrong. The studio has not posted a remaining headcount of its own, only the Doom (2016) comparison.

What the Remaining Team Is Being Asked to Deliver

Co-studio director Hugo Martin used a Bethesda Doom stream for Revelations to reject the bleakest staffing math. He said reports that the studio had been gutted down to 50 people were false, that the team matched Doom (2016), and that id Tech was alive, with engineers in Frankfurt and at MachineGames as well as in Texas.

There’s been reports that we’ve been nerfed into the ground and gutted and we have 50 people, and that’s not true. We’re the size we were when we made Doom (2016), and id Tech is very much alive and well.

Hugo Martin, co-studio director, Bethesda-hosted Doom livestream

He said the Doom team was still there and that the studio would share what it is making when it is “appropriate and approved.” There is no public sequel date. Revelations had just gone live, which left the studio between shipped work and an unannounced next job.

Staff who lived through the cut did not buy the 2016 comparison as comfort. Multiple people told a trade reporter that around two thirds of those still at id who had worked on Doom (2016) were among the July cuts, including people who wore several hats. One current employee put it in the language of the games.

“I’ve been a gamer my whole life. If you cut a stat in half everyone would call that nerfed. In truth the Doom team is half here, half thrown away,” that employee said. The same person said many who were laid off heard Martin’s remarks as a shrug at their work.

Former principal VFX artist Derek Best wrote on LinkedIn that he was still in shock at how hard the cuts were. “Collectively decades of knowledge was wiped out of the studio,” he said. John “Jebus” Roberts, a principal engine programmer in Local 6215, was among those let go and later spoke at CWA rallies about the people behind each of the 1,600 July exits.

WHERE THE STAFFING CLAIMS SPLIT

• The studio note: Cuts were spread across teams; the remaining crew matches Doom (2016) and can still build games and id Tech.
• Hugo Martin: The 50-person figure is wrong; id Tech work continues in Texas, Frankfurt, and at MachineGames.
• People on the cut list: Two thirds of the remaining Doom (2016) veterans were let go, and a smaller roster is not the same studio with the same memory.

The DLC and the layoff news shared a single cycle, which is why the cut landed like a victory lap over the people who had just shipped. Geoff Keighley put the two facts in one post on July 7, 2026: a reported 50 percent cut, and Revelations out that day. The Texas notice later made the id Software number 136, larger than the first “just heard 95” posts. The engine-is-dead panic moved faster than Xbox’s “dozens of people” reply.

CWA Filed the Charge in Fort Worth

On July 15, 2026, CWA lodged an unfair labor practice charge filed July 15 with the National Labor Relations Board. Case 16-CA-390759 sits in Region 16 in Fort Worth and lists the location as Richardson. Status on the board’s docket is Open.

The named respondents are Microsoft, Xbox, ZeniMax Media, id Software, Bethesda Game Studios, ZeniMax Online Studios, ZeniMax Quality Assurance, ZeniMax Customer Service/User Research, and ZeniMax Content Technology and Operations, as joint and single employers. The allegations are repudiation or modification of contract through unilateral changes, refusal to furnish information, refusal to bargain or bad-faith bargaining, and coercive actions including surveillance.

CWA Canada president Carmel Smyth said the unions jointly alleged that Microsoft “unlawfully fired people without giving notice to or discussing it with the union as the employer is legally obliged to do when we are in the middle of ongoing bargaining a collective agreement.” A CWA spokesperson said Microsoft did not do decisional bargaining before the July 6 notice and the layoff calls.

Microsoft said it had reached out to the union to begin effects bargaining and was committed to that process. It also said it was focused on supporting people who were hit while positioning the group for long-term strength. Effects bargaining is talks about the aftermath of a decision. Decisional bargaining is talks about whether to make the cut at all. That gap is the core of the charge.

Rallies ran the same week outside ZeniMax sites in Rockville, Austin, Dallas, and Montreal. Later CWA actions kept the same demand: a first contract with layoff rules, not another round of facts on the ground and talks after the names are already off the badge list.

QuakeCon Marked 35 Years With a Smaller Studio

The July note had promised QuakeCon in August. The show went ahead as the 30th QuakeCon and as a 35-year marker for the studio. id Software posted from the floor as Marty Stratton and Hugo Martin talked about what the anniversary meant to them. MachineGames, not the thinned Richardson roster, arrived with a new Quake episode, Dawn of the Machine. The four founders appeared for a long look back.

That is a strange split to watch. The history of Doom and Quake filled the hall. The new Quake work sat with a sibling studio. The Texas team that had just shipped Revelations was the size of its 2016 self, by its own account, and still had no posted next game.

Xbox kept cutting after July. On September 22, 2026, it said 268 more roles were going, and that with studio divestitures it was roughly three-quarters of the way through the plan Sharma announced in July. CWA, in its own statement that day, put the 268 on the same profit-over-workers line. The Fort Worth charge did not close. The remaining Xbox cuts still sit on the FY27 calendar.

id Software still exists. Doom is still on Bethesda’s franchise list. The Texas notice, the empty first-contract file, and the Doom (2016) headcount are now the facts the next game has to be made under.