Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

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• Hacker News
• > 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.

  by falcor84
• 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.

  by lenerdenator
• Nice downplay. This is getting dumped by a romantic partner who supported you by paying for your rent, food and other needs/wants.
  by MisterTea
• 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
  by dymk
• 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.

  by 0xWTF
• Carmack left id waaay before Microsoft has acquired id (transitively by acquiring Zenimax/Bethesda)
  by DarkNova6
• Carmack hasn’t worked at id for 13 years
  by bathtub365
• Carmack had left id by the time he got into vr/at, iirc they snagged him from a rocket company?
  by bcjdjsndon
• Time to unionize, Americans!
  by wegwerper
• 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.
  by iepathos
• They worked on the reboot games which are considered widely successful relative to other games released around the same time.
  by parasti
• $2.93 trillion market cap....layoffs

  Bizarre incentives we have created

  by 2OEH8eoCRo0
• Their gaming division is not doing well.

  Those are de facto separate organizations.

  by epolanski
• msft gaming likely has a negative market cap
  by HDThoreaun
• What the fuck
  by HeavyStorm
• When people think that tech is a meritocracy and being good means you won't be laid off, show them this.
  by bossyTeacher
• 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.
  by gigatexal
• Too much boomer nostalgia about iD. I get it I am old too but people need to understand that the world moves on.

  The glory days of iD are long, long gone and Microsoft needs to start making some goddamn money on Xbox. And iD hasn't been pulling their weight.

  by expedition32
• Perhaps also a bit of ageism. Always hard to prove. Often implicit.
  by danjl
• 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)/¯

  by lain98
• 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.

  by markus_zhang
• 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.

  by bellowsgulch
• All those devs need to get together and form their own studio, and then sell it back to Microsoft for $83 billion.

  Oh wait...

  by CyanLite2
• They are moving most of their development to India, where it's pretty easy to find bottom-dollar UE5 dev shops.
  by iamleppert
• 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.
  by tayo42
• Do you have a source for this ?
  by pipes
• Too bad they didn't double down and sell the Id Tech Engine and be a competitor to UE. Instead of folding.
  by FrustratedMonky
• So I guess $27B in _profit_ in Q1 alone this year isn't enough for MSFT.

  Need to fire 3000 people to make ends meet.

  Tough.

  by insane_dreamer
• Related:

  Resetting Xbox

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48804993

  by ChrisArchitect
• Some more earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48810496
  by ChrisArchitect