Why Microsoft would rather run id Software on Unreal than pay its engine coders
id Software built the engines behind Doom, Quake and every Wolfenstein. Then Apogee's Scott Miller posted that Microsoft had just fired half of them, including, in his words, the best coders in the industry.
Xbox's new layoffs cut 1,600 roles now and 3,200 by 2027, with four studios spun out. Among the reported casualties: the idTech engine team at id Software, the lineage behind Doom, Quake and every Wolfenstein since.
The thread's sharpest read wasn't nostalgia. Keeping an in-house engine means keeping engineers who know it, and can therefore ask for more. Switch to Unreal Engine and you rent low-wage contractors instead, hired per project and dropped when it ships.
What we actually know: an Xbox purge and one founder's furious post
The report sits on top of a much larger cut. Xbox chief Asha Sharma's email laid out 3,200 role eliminations across FY27, with 1,600 going immediately and four studios leaving Xbox for new management. id Software reaches Microsoft through a chain: ZeniMax bought id in 2009, Microsoft bought ZeniMax for $7.5B in 2020, and ZeniMax's board was later dissolved.
The claim that idTech's engine team specifically was gutted traces to one post. Apogee co-founder Scott Miller wrote that "Microsoft/XBOX decided half the team was deemed USELESS and needed to be let go," calling them "the best of the best coders in the industry"; a 20-plus-year id veteran, Michael Maynard, was named among the impacted. The article, several readers noted, offers little beyond these posts as proof.
The thread's cold logic: an in-house engine is leverage you have to pay for
The most-upvoted reframing wasn't nostalgia, it was incentives:
"Your employees ... could do bad things like ask for more money ... laying off your whole engine team and switching to UE5 means ... tons of low-wage contractors ... It lets you treat your employees as a replaceable commodity ... rather than a cohesive team of skilled artisans." — an engineer laying out the incentives
A longer reply set the same move in historical frame. idTech was a real weapon when Doom and Quake outran everything, then the edge faded as graphics homogenized:
"in the 2020s, we have UE5 for AAA games ... what is the competitive advantage in maintaining your own engine?" — a commenter who walked the timeline from Doom through Crysis to UE5
Not everyone accepts the trade. The pushback was about what players get:
"UE5 games are manifestly lower quality than games built on custom engines ... I won't buy games built on Unreal Engine." — a player who boycotts Unreal Engine titles
But was the engine team even the target?
The skeptics never let the headline settle. One reader noted the article showed "no real evidence" the idTech team specifically was cut, just anger at the idea. A commenter who combed LinkedIn for the actual layoffs found mostly art, design, QA and production roles in the Dallas–Fort Worth studio, and pointed out that most idTech work happened in the Frankfurt studio, whose fate wasn't yet clear. What is confirmed, one reader noted via Jason Schreier's reporting, is that id is cutting a "significant number of staff."
Whichever way the engine roles fall, the thread's throughline holds: a bespoke engine increasingly looks like leverage a publisher would rather not pay for. Which is why some workers are getting ahead of it. A big chunk of Blizzard, one commenter noted, has already pre-emptively unionized.
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