id Software says it still has the crew it needs as layoffs reach its Frankfurt engine office

id Software put out a statement on Friday saying it still has the people it needs to make games. The same day, layoffs hit its Frankfurt office, where most of the work on the id Tech engine happens.

Aftermath, which spoke to current and former employees, reports that six of the twelve id workers in Frankfurt were let go, roughly the same ratio as the cuts in Texas earlier in the week. Bethesda staff in the same office were affected too. Frankfurt was small to begin with, a dozen people across art and programming with most of them on the engine team. The six who remain work on id Tech, and by Aftermath's count they now make up the majority of id's id Tech engineers, with two more in Dallas.

What the numbers say

A WARN notice filed in Texas on Wednesday put hard figures on the Richardson headquarters: 96 workers laid off on site, plus 40 remote roles, for 136 in total. The Communications Workers of America said last December that id had 185 employees. If that count still held, most of the studio is gone.

The cuts are part of the Xbox reset Microsoft announced on July 6, which eliminates 3,200 roles across the games division over the fiscal year, starting with 1,600 immediately. Obsidian is reportedly losing about a quarter of its staff. Bethesda president Jill Braff told employees in an internal email obtained by IGN that the publisher is reorganizing around its biggest franchises rather than planning studio by studio.

The statement

Here is what id posted on Friday, in full:

While our studio was impacted, those changes were spread across teams. We still have the crew we need to build the games and tech we're known for. The team today is about the same size we were when making DOOM (2016). We have always had a flat studio where everyone is a maker, and we will remain true to that philosophy moving forward.

The post went on to say the studio is focused on supporting the people who were let go, and that it will see fans at QuakeCon in August.

Microsoft made a narrower claim to Kotaku about the engine itself: "There are dozens of people working on id Tech across multiple locations. Reports that there's only one person left in Texas are inaccurate."

Both of those can be true and still leave the thing people are worried about unaddressed. Nobody serious is arguing that zero engineers remain. The argument coming from the people who were cut is about which engineers remain.

What the developers who were cut are saying

Derek Best, a VFX artist who worked on all three modern Doom games, wrote on LinkedIn that the VFX team was reduced to a single artist with no lead and no producer, and that the engine programmer behind the particle editor work was let go. He also said everyone with Houdini experience for procedural modeling and cached animation is gone, which he thinks strands the pipeline work done for Doom: The Dark Ages.

"Nothing says business success like nuking a team into the dirt and relegating them to support studio size while also throwing out massive technological achievements," he wrote. He expects the studio ends up on Unreal.

That is speculation from someone who no longer works there, and it should be read that way. What is not speculation is the timing. The layoffs landed the day before the Revelations expansion for Doom: The Dark Ages shipped. Todd Boyce, another id VFX artist, said the team had worked unpaid overtime to finish it.

id has been unionized wall to wall with the CWA since 2025 under Microsoft's labor neutrality agreement, and the union still does not have a first contract. CWA president Claude Cummings Jr. has said Microsoft slow-walked bargaining, which left members without contract protections when the cuts came. The union is holding Save Our Devs demonstrations outside the id, Bethesda, and Obsidian offices next week.

Where this leaves things

id Tech has a reputation earned over 35 years, and it was earned by specific people doing specific work. A studio can keep a headcount number roughly steady on paper and still lose the person who knew why the renderer does what it does. That is the claim on the table, and id's statement does not answer it. QuakeCon is in August. Whatever id shows there is the first real answer.