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.
SteveNuts 27 minutes ago [-]
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 9 minutes ago [-]
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.
londons_explore 15 minutes ago [-]
With the current trajectory of AI, I see unionisation efforts dead in the water.
sdenton4 10 minutes ago [-]
Why is that?
Companies still need employees, and ai makes it more obvious than ever that workers need to organize together for their rights.
Alex-C137 13 minutes ago [-]
Which current trajectory are you referring to?
kaoD 3 minutes ago [-]
With the current trajectory of looms, I see unionisation efforts dead in the water.
- Someone in the early 19th century
mock-possum 11 minutes ago [-]
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.
0xWTF 9 minutes ago [-]
> if software engineering unionization ever starts to take hold
So, you know, do that. <insert "c'mon, do something" meme>
sleepybrett 7 minutes ago [-]
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 4 minutes ago [-]
> ship a successful game probably get laid off anyways
That's what happened here: they just released the big DOOM DLC today. Chop!
Lerc 8 minutes ago [-]
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.
jayd16 6 minutes ago [-]
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 19 minutes ago [-]
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.
wnevets 22 minutes ago [-]
> It lets you treat your employees as a replaceable commodity
This has been the objective of the tech industry for years
noisy_boy 13 minutes ago [-]
Employee as Kubernetes pod.
reaperducer 3 minutes ago [-]
Cattle, not ~~pets~~ human beings.
We've optimized our own destruction.
sleepybrett 5 minutes ago [-]
that's the objective for all employers everywhere all the time.
branon 18 minutes ago [-]
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_ 15 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
matt_eeee 27 minutes ago [-]
Sounds great until Epic realises they can charge whatever they like in licensing fees.
maccard 3 minutes ago [-]
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 5 minutes ago [-]
Unity tried that and lost a lot of good will. Not sure it really mattered in the grand scheme though.
whateveracct 2 minutes ago [-]
it also makes your games worse. those general purpose engines all have a smell to them.
gruez 19 minutes ago [-]
>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 14 minutes ago [-]
>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)
N19PEDL2 14 minutes ago [-]
It looks exactly like what Microsoft already did to its browser engine Trident, which was replaced by Google’s Blink on Edge.
mjr00 11 minutes ago [-]
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.
reaperducer 2 minutes ago [-]
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 4 minutes ago [-]
Man I miss tribes and tribes 2. Sadly the revival was garbage.
redsocksfan45 19 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
everdrive 16 minutes ago [-]
And of course, there is really no down-side to low-wage contractors wielding UE5. /s
paytonjjones 27 minutes ago [-]
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 23 minutes ago [-]
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 18 minutes ago [-]
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?
blanched 27 seconds ago [-]
What are you basing “it delivers more value to customers” on?
zaptheimpaler 6 minutes ago [-]
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.
dymk 24 minutes ago [-]
Efficient for who? The people who lost their jobs?
FeepingCreature 17 minutes ago [-]
Game making.
Grombobulous 40 minutes ago [-]
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 10 minutes ago [-]
But it will result in a fat bonus for Asha Sharma.
The only thing that truly counts, for her.
satvikpendem 5 minutes ago [-]
What is the recipe?
lenerdenator 32 minutes ago [-]
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 25 minutes ago [-]
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 8 minutes ago [-]
I'm confused, do people want endless sequels or not?
pjc50 4 minutes ago [-]
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".
eightysixfour 4 minutes ago [-]
People will tell you they do not want endless sequels. Sales numbers will mostly disagree with them.
lenerdenator 17 minutes ago [-]
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.
throwaway27448 1 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
eightysixfour 7 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
bigbuppo 34 minutes ago [-]
Have you ever watched Shaq fall?
reactordev 37 minutes ago [-]
Microsoft’s Modus Operandi.
__patchbit__ 8 minutes ago [-]
Human labor plus AI tokens must double input capital on loop track output.
dismalaf 30 minutes ago [-]
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 24 minutes ago [-]
>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 22 minutes ago [-]
They are unprofitable though. Profit margins of the entire Xbox division are less than just sticking the money in the bond market.
gruez 17 minutes ago [-]
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 11 minutes ago [-]
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?
eightysixfour 41 minutes ago [-]
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.
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 17 seconds ago [-]
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.
bix6 8 minutes ago [-]
> 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?
pjc50 2 minutes ago [-]
The directors like money. And are probably beholden to their investors.
eightysixfour 23 minutes ago [-]
Yes, it was mentioned in the article. I just don't count a tweet from an "insider" as particularly strong evidence anymore.
CuriouslyC 19 minutes ago [-]
Miller has a history with id, and has probably gotten numerous reports directly from boots on the ground in the company.
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.
> 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.
kibwen 22 minutes ago [-]
What we know so far is just that id is "cutting a "significant number of staff":
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 25 minutes ago [-]
What's the tweet it references then?
0xWTF 4 minutes ago [-]
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.
LarsDu88 23 minutes ago [-]
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.
CuriouslyC 15 minutes ago [-]
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.
CuriouslyC 7 minutes ago [-]
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.
Catloafdev 42 minutes ago [-]
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 36 minutes ago [-]
Absolutely, the first versions until idTech 5 were open source and a number of important engines, like Source, derive from it.
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 24 minutes ago [-]
> at its best
This looks more like simple corporate incompetence. They never should have made those very expensive acquisitions.
satvikpendem 4 minutes ago [-]
EEE requires them to have succeeded to extinguish, not just be incompetent as to close them down.
LadyCailin 47 seconds ago [-]
[delayed]
Goronmon 15 minutes ago [-]
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 9 minutes ago [-]
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.
koteelok 46 minutes ago [-]
No more DOOM games (((
owlninja 42 minutes ago [-]
Or future releases will just use Unreal Engine or something pre-existing :(
koteelok 35 minutes ago [-]
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.
falcor84 32 minutes ago [-]
> 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 23 minutes ago [-]
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
MisterTea 13 minutes ago [-]
Nice downplay. This is getting dumped by a romantic partner who supported you by paying for your rent, food and other needs/wants.
lenerdenator 21 minutes ago [-]
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 10 minutes ago [-]
> 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 6 minutes ago [-]
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.
moogly 24 minutes ago [-]
On the same day they release the new Dark Ages DLC. The game industry continues to be brutal.
2OEH8eoCRo0 12 minutes ago [-]
$2.93 trillion market cap....layoffs
Bizarre incentives we have created
georgemcbay 25 minutes ago [-]
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)
delduca 46 minutes ago [-]
Next: Blizzard
datakan 42 minutes ago [-]
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 28 minutes ago [-]
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.
Someone1234 42 minutes ago [-]
Blizzard is such a shell now, that I doubt we'd notice.
CuriouslyC 12 minutes ago [-]
A big chunks of Blizzard has already pre-emptively unionized for this exact reason.
oreally 2 minutes ago [-]
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.
FrustratedMonky 11 minutes ago [-]
Too bad they didn't double down and sell the Id Tech Engine and be a competitor to UE. Instead of folding.
colechristensen 43 minutes ago [-]
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 40 minutes ago [-]
> 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 37 minutes ago [-]
> 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 20 minutes ago [-]
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 30 minutes ago [-]
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 17 minutes ago [-]
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 35 minutes ago [-]
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.
iamleppert 33 minutes ago [-]
They are moving most of their development to India, where it's pretty easy to find bottom-dollar UE5 dev shops.
tayo42 5 minutes ago [-]
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.
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.
genxy 26 minutes ago [-]
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.
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]
"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.
akramachamarei 3 minutes ago [-]
Although there are things to criticize in the Linkedin post, the moralization ego defense mechanism is not the one it employed.
bigbuppo 30 minutes ago [-]
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 26 minutes ago [-]
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.
bigbuppo 17 minutes ago [-]
Well I hope you get exactly what you want.
allthetime 36 minutes ago [-]
10 years of employment with a fat salary. Sounds horrible
feelamee 37 minutes ago [-]
I don't really understand. Id Software is owned by Microsoft? Why Microsoft can laying off employees of Id Software?
starkparker 30 minutes ago [-]
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]
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 33 minutes ago [-]
Yes. When ZeniMax owns Id, and Microsoft owns ZeniMax.
Rendered at 16:38:01 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
There's a lot of money in gaming but the workers are treated like shit, as you pointed out.
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.
- Someone in the early 19th century
So, you know, do that. <insert "c'mon, do something" meme>
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.
That's what happened here: they just released the big DOOM DLC today. Chop!
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.
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.
This has been the objective of the tech industry for years
We've optimized our own destruction.
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.
You're in an extreme minority. Also, unfortunately, Unreal is popular with indies who probably have (in general, relatively) more ethical staffing practices.
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"?
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)
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.
Both can be true.
Just because it's becoming more common doesn't mean it's not bad.
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.
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.
The only thing that truly counts, for her.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm trying to think of a Microsoft acquisition which has been a success. Nothing comes to mind.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Was IdTech used outside of Id? Or was it just a Doom series thing as of recently?
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.
I wonder what's happening to MachineGames...
Microsoft needs to be split, it should been split years ago, but now more than ever.
This looks more like simple corporate incompetence. They never should have made those very expensive acquisitions.
"Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" isn't applicable at all in this context though?
Fuck Microsoft.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Bizarre incentives we have created
Who woulda thunk they were full of crap...? (besides everyone who didn't have a financial stake in the deal)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
1. Tax write off.
2. Acquiring a competitor, and then closing them down is a way to decrease competiton.
Resetting Xbox
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48804993
Anyone know?
Did it appear First in quake or quake III?
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...
"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.
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.
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...