136 Employees Laid Off at id Software and 22 at Bethesda Game Studios in Texas - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 08 July 2026 / 5,162 Views
A WARN notice filed in Texas, spotted by Game Developer, has revealed 158 employees at ZeniMax Media have been laid off in the state.
The studio hit the hardest is id Software in Richardson, Texas with 96 employees made redundant, along with 40 remote, for a total of 136 laid off. The Austin, Texas office for Bethesda Game Studios has also seen 22 employees laid off.
146 of the 158 workers laid off are represented by labor union Communication Workers of America.
There have been reports claiming around 50 percent of employees at id Software have been laid off as part of the mass Xbox layoffs. LinkedIn previously showed around 350 people had listed id Software as their place of work.
The number of employees at id Software's Frankfurt, Germany location appears to be unchanged as Germany labor laws require advance notice for layoffs.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can follow the author on Bluesky.
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Fucking hell man.....being a Dallas native, id Software were gods to me growing up. Been attending Quakecon for nearly 20 years now, and will attend next month. Seemingly being relegated to support-studio status and working in Unreal Engine has to be the biggest slap in the face for such a legendary studio that came back and gave us arguably the best action FPS titles we've had in years.
Gonna be a depressing opening keynote from Marty and Hugo at Quakecon.
Random but what a coincidence that two fellow Texans (you and I) are the first two to respond to an article detailing the laying off of some Texan devs lol.
Wish it was for better news lol. id and Ensemble Studios were the goats of video games in Dallas.
I live only a few minutes from id’s office. Even ran into Hugo Martin last week at a dessert place after work lol. He was pretty quiet when I talked to him. I can now understand why. Just a sad sight to see.
Its sad news if those Enployees were delivering on preformance, but these companies will rehire again giving new people a chance to shine.
I know it happens when a game underperforms but he entire engine team is gone. Game was great on a technical level, but idTech is getting a death sentence
ooof...
I'm actually "Pro" reduction of staff at Xbox as they are widely OVER staffed
But Id and Bethesda both use proprietary engines... There's no way this doesn't hurt their workflow
I’m pretty sure Xbox leadership saw that they’re spending unknown millions on Unreal Engine licensing and thought getting rid of idTech would be a good cost cutting move since they now no longer have to pay an engineering team that only works with a single game that they feel can be replicated in Unreal.
Bethesda Games Studios will be fine. Their main studio is in Maryland, which did have some layoffs, but nowhere near as many. Their smaller sister studio in Texas was affected.
anyways i've given up on most of these studios, hoping Bioware doesn't waste their last chance
Remember that next time Union Snake Oil salesmen come around your office. The studio was failing, not making money, not making good games, and running out its budget. They unionized and promised everyone "you can't be fired". 7 months ago.
Now 75 percent are fired, as expected. Can't shield a business from losing money. They are not the government.
That's not how it works, unions hold more power than individual workers to make better deals with the company and that's it. Unionized workers can't be fired for joining an union, because that's union busting and that's illegal.
But then again, in Trump's America, that might as well be legal...
they unionized to shelter bad employees from getting laid off and to provide bigger bonuses when they got fired, that's not how you make money, you make money by making a better game
they all got fired because the company lost all the money, not because they are a union
If you've played the doom games, do you honestly think they should have had over 50 employees? Be honest. They had 350 employees at one time during development (180 after release), which is crazy for a game that sold 1/3 as many copies as Dragon Age the Veilguard.
I'm still waiting for a Marathon game too ;(
Doom 2016 sold half as well as Dragon Age Veilguard. Doom Eternal did about as well (their only success in 15 years). Doom Dark Ages did 1/3 as well as Veilguard.
But they did release cosmetic packs for Eternal that nobody bought (pink unicorn and rainbow guns....) that must have made them $100,000 or so.
I'm kind of surprised that anyone thought they were a successful studio, they get a lot of good press which is the opposite of how players feel about the company.
I'm still waiting for a good Doom game.
Not quite sure where you're getting those numbers from. On PC alone Doom 2016 sold 500k in the first month, 1 million on PC in the first 4 months, and 2 million on PC in the first 13 months. With Xbox One and PS4 added on, it should have been over 4 million in that first 13 months I'd estimate, and with legs since that first 13 months, well above that.
Doom Eternal meanwhile had a stronger launch than 2016 did, physical sales were down by 33% compared to Doom 2016, partly due to covid social distancing in 2020 killing in-person retail physical sales, but digital in the first month was estimated at 3m by SuperData, up from 950k digital for Doom 2016 on SuperData's estimates.
Doom The Dark Ages had 3 million players in the first week, but it was estimated by Alinea Analytics that only 800k of those 3m players were sales, the other 2.2m on Gamepass. No updates since then, but with 800k sales in the first week according to that estimate, it should have sold at least 2m by now over a year after release, with probably 2.5 times that many players from Gamepass. It was a sales underperformance for sure, though hard to say how much of that was due to day one Gamepass and how much was due to the game itself.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard took 3 months to hit 1.5 million players (half in 3 months of Doom The Dark Ages' player count in the first week), not sales, the game was on EA's Play Pro subscription service from day one on PC which will have boosted player count by at least a couple hundred thousand over sales. It also had a much larger budget than any of the Doom games, Bioware worked on 3 different iterations of the game from 2015 through 2024, 9 years of developer salaries on the budget, compared to 5 years on the longest in development Doom game in the trio, The Dark Ages.
sorry, i was referring to launch sales, and concurrent numbers, obviously Dragon Age Veilguard dropped off like a cliff after even the first 2 weeks after people realized how bad it was
Something to remember about Steam peak concurrent user counts is that Steam itself has been growing in popularity for over a decade now. In 2015 the peak concurrent user count for Steam itself was 8.4 million, in August 2017 it was 14m, in January 2018 it was 18.5m, in March 2020 it was 23m, in December 2024 it was 39.2m, and in October 2025 in was 41.6m. Daily active user counts increased similarly throughout the time.
So comparing a game from 2016 to a game from 2024 in concurrent user counts on Steam isn't super accurate, since the platform itself grew by almost 5x during that window in concurrent user counts. Had Doom 2016 released years later, it no doubt would have done at least as well as Doom Eternal's 100k concurrent. No doubt though that Doom: The Dark Ages underperformed on Steam, 31k peak concurrent on Steam in 2025 is terrible beside the numbers of Doom 2016 and Eternal in 2020 when Steam itself was smaller, quite alot on PC (and Xbox) clearly decided to sub for 1 month on Gamepass to play it for cheap, considering the game hit 3m players in the first week but did so poorly in sales on Steam and Xbox, most of the sales were likely on PS5 since it didn't have Gamepass. It's no wonder that Asha seems to be killing off day one Gamepass releases and is gutting id so that she can rebuild it, after The Dark Ages underperformed that badly in sales.
of course, for example Mass Effect buyers like myself bought on Origin so weren't included on Steam Charts :)
i was comparing games all released in the last 10 years, i think that's fair for steam charts, as long as you don't go back before 2015
Dragon Age Veilguard had about 100,000 concurrent players on launch compared to 50,000 for Doom 2016 on PC using Steam. That doesn't even include the massive number of Xbox game pass and EA subcription players: Dragon Age Veilguard also had 1.5 million players including the subscription service so it is hard to compare as EA is the most subscribed service (it is part of Xbox Game pass also).
I still stand by what I said, I think twice as many people played Veilguard as Doom 2016, at least in the first month.
iD established since 1991 as a game studio, how many can claim to be that old in this turmoil of an industry and a few years into ownership by MS, basically gutted. Did Dark Ages fail that much?
Bethesda Austin layoffs aren't surprising, they manage Fallout 76 which has been on the decline in playerbase. That many at id though is far more surprising, they had one underperforming game (Doom: The Dark Ages) and that was enough to gut them. Just goes to show how bad a state Xbox was in when Asha came in.
On the plus side, Asha did list Doom and Quake among Xbox's core franchises that she wants to focus on, so I assume this wasn't about closing id but rather about rebuilding them into the kind of studio that can output AAA games quickly and without huge bloated developer counts, everything Asha has said leads me to believe she isn't a fan of the modern AAA and wants to return AAA to what it once was, 100-200 devs putting out a game every 3 or 4 years, rather than what AAA became, 350+ devs taking 5-6 or more years. to make a game.
I suspect the layoffs were focused on 3 main areas, creatives who had a part in the decisions that made The Dark Ages underperform, the id tech team since she wants to move them to Unreal engine presumably, and the bloated middle management within the studio itself (she said some games had to go through as many as 14 management layers, a good many of those inside the studios themselves).
I bet they're gonna be replaced with AI. -_-
no way, AI does basic things, they are being fired because they are not making money and not selling games
Art and animation aren't basic things.
art and animation isn't done by the AI, usually repetitive tasks are the main use for it
Tell that to Rovio and Sega.
At this point, id is just a shell of its former glory. Now they're just a regular studio - if even that after these news.
