Bethesda downplays id Software layoffs

By Robert Purchese Published 11 January, 2012

"Standard business practice."

A spate of layoffs at famous video game maker id Software (Quake, Doom, Wolfenstein, Rage) has been deemed "standard business practice" by owner Bethesda Softworks.

"As part of its standard business practice, id regularly evaluates staffing to ensure it has a workforce that meets the needs of the studio," the company told GameSpot.

"As part of that process, some id employees were recently let go.

"Id is still recruiting and hiring qualified developers, and development work on future id titles continues unabated."

It's not clear how many staff were let go.

Id Software's Rage launched last year. It had a troubled arrival, dogged by bugs and performance issues, but faired well both commercially and critically nonetheless.

Id Software will now set to work on Doom 4, Doom Doom Doom Doom. Maybe.

Rage.

Picture of Robert.

About Robert Purchese

Bertie is Eurogamer's Senior Staff Writer. When he's not hunting down news stories he's often found playing with his kids or gabbling about fantasy games and strange online worlds. @Clert on Twitter.

Read more articles from Robert by visiting the Robert Purchese archive page.

You may also like...

Comments (45) Latest comment 4 months ago

Comments for this article are now closed, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • TrentTech #1 4 months ago

    While I don't know about consoles, for the most part Rage worked perfectly fine on the PC if you had the correct up-to-date drivers installed. There are only two people at fault for that:

    a) the tons of people who never bothered updating their graphics drivers but moaned anyway. You game on the PC, needing up to date drivers for cutting edge games is STANDARD PROCEDURE.

    b) AMD/ATI for buggering up their driver releases so badly it took multiple attempts for them to actually put out the correct drivers. If a dev is relying on them to make the correct drivers available, there is nothing the dev can do to make things right if the graphics card manufacturer has such major fits of incompetence.

    Very fun game with stunning visuals on cutting edge visuals. A typical ID Software game in every sense of the phrase, especially how they bit off more than they could chew with the scope of the game, but that didn't degrade the experience for me, it just left me wanting more.

  • Liquidoodle #2 4 months ago

    "standard business practice" even when they say that it's still people loosing their jobs which is a bit of a shame :(

  • uninspiredcup #3 4 months ago

    ID piddled on the pc auidence. Carmack talked crap about the platfomr with doom and gloom, proclaimed they didn't even playtest it on the pc until it worked on a control pad and put out a broken game without dedicated servers.

    Hopefully the studio completely closes down.

  • Darren #4 4 months ago

    RAGE ran flawlessly for me on my GTX 580 right from launch. I understand that it was AMD graphics card owners that got the short straw as it took AMD months to address bugs but then that's why I don't like their products. A graphics card is only as good as its drivers after all and if they're rubbish well it doesn't matter how good the hardware is.

  • Eldritch #5 4 months ago

    "As part of its standard business practice, id regularly evaluates staffing to ensure it has a workforce that meets the needs of the studio," the company told GameSpot.

    "As part of that process, some id employees were recently let go.

    "Id is still recruiting and hiring qualified developers, and development work on future id titles continues unabated."
    Translates as:

    "We had to fire some people who, in our book, weren't all that good. Now we're hiring some new people who, in our book, are better."

    Amazing news item there.
    Edited by Eldritch at 11/01/12 @ 16:25

  • Subdominator #6 4 months ago

    Yeah, totally agree. And most of all they got the shooting mechanics right as only id can do. It's my GOTY, slightly ahead of Skyrim.

    And this really isn't newsworthy. People get upset but it's just because nowadays we're all so connected with Twitter and Facebook that this stuff comes out and frustrated ex-employees make a big story of it. It happened before. Will happen again. It's only in the news because nobody bothers to post on Twitter that id Software just hired ten developers. It's not exciting, so nobody talks about the hiring, just the firing. The few people that were let go probably just didn't get their job done because there are no signs that id Software is experiencing any restructuring as a result of Rage (which as we know didn't sell that bad, it still managed to become the second best selling id game of all time behind Doom 3, at least in total sales). And why would it, Bethesda didn't even pay for the development of Rage. The game was self-funded by id for five years and then two years by id and EA until Bethesda bought the publishing rights from EA to release it themselfs (otherwise they wouldn't have seen a dime of the Rage revenue, that game was excluded from when Bethesda bought id Software). And for a new IP Rage did really good.

    Doom 4 is what will decide whether id Software stays the "2 projects at a time" company that it became after being bought by Bethesda or if it will have to reduce it's manpower significantly (they hired 150 people over the last two years). If Doom 4 really has three times the visual fidelity than Rage as Carmack claims I doubt it will fail. Rage was already a stunner considering it ran at a rock solid 60 fps. Oh and Doom 4 will of course have classic Deathmatch. That should help.

  • MENTAL1ST Verified Senior Software Engineer, Picsel UK Ltd. #7 4 months ago

    Doom Doom Doom Doom
    I'm gonna shoot you right down,
    right offa your feet
    Take you home with me,
    put you in my house
    Doom Doom Doom Doom
    A-haw haw haw haw
    Edited by MENTAL1ST at 11/01/12 @ 16:37

  • MENTAL1ST Verified Senior Software Engineer, Picsel UK Ltd. #8 4 months ago

    or if you prefer...

    Doom Doom Doom Doom
    I want you in my room
    Let's spend the night together
    From now until forever
    Doom Doom Doom Doom
    I wanna double Doom
    Let's spend the night together
    Together in my room

  • Eraysor #9 4 months ago

    I really wasn't a fan of Rage. I've loved most of id's games since I was a kid (Quake's still the best) but Rage really felt like a watered down version of Fallout 3 or Borderlands, although the shooting mechanics did feel great. The unoriginal setting really didn't help it at all.

  • jimr9999us #10 4 months ago

    Wow the games biz is high pressure. But I guess if you spend 5 years on a title it should be fun?

    Id had to be crying when Borderlands released. That sure wasn't planned.

  • Inmediasress #11 4 months ago

    @uninspiredcup

    I partially agree with you.
    Carmack was bought up by Bethedanimax to make a new sandbox engine for them since Gambryo is for all purpuses dead.
    I guess rage was supposed to be the tech demo for it but since its neither a sandbox engine/game and it does have other problems no wonder Bethesda are cracking down on ID.
    Hopefully by next gen Carmack will make them a good sandbox engine and we won't have around atrocities like Skyrim running on a half dead engine.

  • TeaFiend #12 4 months ago

    @Inmediasress Except id was acquired when it was already working on Rage, there was originally some discussion about whether the original publisher (EA) was going to be still publishing it or whether BethesdaZenimax were going to do a deal. In the end BZ paid some money to the lovely gentlemen at EA and no judges had to do legal work.

  • Ternon #13 4 months ago

    I am very surprised that they would go on to make Doom 4 instead of focusing on Rage DLC, expansions and Rage sequel, it was such an excellent game and has a huge potential.
    Edited by Ternon at 11/01/12 @ 17:08

  • kangarootoo #14 4 months ago

    "As part of its standard business practice..."

    I'm sure there was a time when this wasn't the case in our industry.

    Or putting it another way, having to let people go when you have spent huge wodges of cash and not made sufficient expected profits to break even is indeed a sometime business practice.... but for most studios standard business practice involved breaking even and either maintaining or expanding your infrastructure.


    Generally in business they say (whoever "they" are) that you should expect to expand by 20-30% a year. If actually contracting your business is standard, your business is going wrong. It is of course standard to access your costs and investments, but layoffs is never in the plan (if it was, you would contract in your workforce - it is cheaper that way).

  • KingFunkIII #15 4 months ago

    @Inmediasress "atrocities like Skyrim running on a half dead engine."

    jeez, thou art hard to please. reminds me of my mate tom who 'just doesn't get' pizza...

  • Spekingur #16 4 months ago

    I've got an AMD card. I had problems running this game. When I finally got the proper drivers I had another problem. It involved mouse responsiveness - meaning, it seemed to lag a tiny bit. Changing mouse sensitivity settings didn't help, going over everything about my mouse didn't help. It works fine in other FPS games.

  • DodgyPast #17 4 months ago

    Was by far the most satisfying shooter of last year.

    Be interesting if they design for a polished old school death match.  Something pick up and play so it's more appealing to those that don't want to grind.

  • Madder-Max #18 4 months ago

    At least they are not putting suicide nets on the side of their building/offices

  • KingFunkIII #19 4 months ago

    @Madder-Max you know, I was in China when that story broke. Even the English language Chinese news network (CCTV) reporter was struggling to keep a straight face...

  • DrStrangelove #20 4 months ago

    I've long been a diehard id fan, but after Rage I've given up on them. Sure, it was good, but that's much less than what their games used to be in the past. The last really great game they made was Q3A, and that was twelve years ago.

    I prefer Crysis 2 to Rage, and Rage will be my last pre-order from id.

  • Subdominator #21 4 months ago

    @Ternon Who says they aren't? DLC is out of the question, id said various times they have no interest in doing DLC because they feel their games should feel complete once you bought it. But they have two teams and while the majority of id is certainly working on Doom 4 it's safe to assume that Rage sold good enough to have a sequel in pre-production right now. Just like Doom 4 was in pre-production while working on Rage. The plan is to release a game every two years.

  • Subdominator #22 4 months ago

    @DrStrangelove Well, for what it's worth: They only made two games in the last twelve years since Q3A. Doom 3 and Rage. And they produced a great successor to Q3A called Quake Enemy Territory, only noone wanted to play it because everybody moved to CoD.

    I doubt something like Q3A would work these days. It had no Singleplayer that's worth mentioning and it was foremost a 1 vs all multiplayer shooter. Those are not exactly popular these days. If you lose in a team based game you can always blame your teammates. If you lose in Q3A it's because you're not good enough.

  • gorf #23 4 months ago

    As part of an, ongoing buisness stratedgy, it is with sad regret we have to make neceessary headcount reductions in development. We need to retool our workforce and align it to the key capabilities of its parent company. To this end all programming staff who lack the necessary skillsets to programme buggy unfinished code (and who are unwilling to code countless patches for released shoddy software) will find thier jobs at risk. Essentially all ID software staff will lose their jobs..apart from the nerdy one who programmes those nifty ground breaking game engines. TBH honest he's the only one we really wanted anyway..all the rest of the ID staff can fuck off...ooh, did just I say that, sorry...must get that patch 1.4 out for the PS3 or ill have to sack some more id staff.

    Yours sincerely, Todd Howard
    Edited by gorf at 11/01/12 @ 20:43

  • Nemesis #24 4 months ago

    Rage quit.

    (sorry)

  • craziii #25 4 months ago

    rage was huge disappointment. super bad graphics and bugs aside, there just wasn't enough content.

  • yoomazir #26 4 months ago

    Well, well, well, I guess Kotakuu wasn't so wrong after all...

  • the_mtfr #27 4 months ago

    @Liquidoodle The jobs and salaries don't come from some sort of Heaven. We're living in a self-regulating market and we are working jobs for other people that are just like you and me (or like you and me but with 10 brains in the case of Carmack). Sometimes they don't have great success with their business ideas so they have to fire people for the company to not shut down entirely. I guess you should zoom out a bit. The game market size is the same (actually increasing bit by bit every year), and if a company doesn't make it at some point, there are plenty others who can't wait to hire and fill the void in the market.

  • polaris70 #28 4 months ago

    @craziii
    I don't agree with that. Rage was an excellent FPS. I think the problem was that the trailers portrayed it as an FPS/RPG hybrid, sort of like Fallout. The game did have RPG elements and a few others but let's not kid ourselves, it was an FPS pure and simple with a few other elements to it. If you approach the game like that then you will have huge satisfaction with it. I say that because the shooting in the game was sublime - amazingly smooth with outstanding enemy character animations and AI. This is relevant, because I've played some FPS's (and that's all, an FPS) over the last few years where the most important thing (the actual shooting) has been clunky and disappointing.

    I will buy a Rage 2, and any DLC they throw out.

  • DrStrangelove #29 4 months ago

    @Subdominator

    I found Q3A a lot more enjoyable even in SP than almost anything that came afterwards.

  • Hellion83 #30 4 months ago

    Post deleted at 20:12:17 01-02-2012

  • MDJRUK68 #31 4 months ago

    Post deleted at 00:58:33 17-01-2012

  • FortysixterUK #32 4 months ago

    Is this because Rage was a bit of a fail ( I liked it ), but not everyone did it seems.
    Is it also because John Carmack was so derogatory of the PC platform and made a bad port ( initially) of Rage on PC ?
    Is it because unless ID make a better game the company is borked any way?

  • penhalion #33 4 months ago

    Rage was a bog standard shooter. The ending (if anyone but me was sad enough to play that far) was stupid. No major boss battle, no great revelation....nothing. In fact I may as well not have been there at the end given my turrets and drones killed everything with rediculous efficiency (not complaining about that given the weakness of the guns the player is given).

    Even the trade in price after just one week was about 10 quid. This alone shows how many people simply bought it back or traded it in at almost record speeds.

    I like ID but, I'm now realising that my liking for them is based on memories of the original doom game and not their recent stuff which has been flawed and stuck in the past gameplay wise.

    Maybe it is time to retire ID and perhaps Bethesda with it's cold hard business logic is the only one that sees that.

  • TheGuvernor #34 4 months ago

    RAGE remains an under appreciated work of technical brilliance.
    Makes Borderlands seem like DORA the EXPLORER.

    Couldn't get enough of it - & I've played 'em all, so to speak.

    I hope future releases with idTech5 demonstrate how ignorant many have truly been.

  • pipito #35 4 months ago

    major problem with rage is it is just mediocre game boring and uninspired. ID just old, they all like 50 years old dudes with no ambitions. time to retire. really.

  • JadedSoul #36 4 months ago

    Post deleted at 08:10:55 26-04-2012

  • Eraser #37 4 months ago

    I absolutely adored Rage. Stunning game, even on XBox 360.

  • Ternon #38 4 months ago

    Btw, Rage graphics was great, but only from afar, up close it looks like a game made 6 years ago(wait, aren't the "new" generation consoles that old?)

    Just look at any portrait hanging on the walls.

    Again we have to thank decrepit consoles for ruining the game and halting progress.

  • 5h1nj1 #39 4 months ago

    I didn't play Rage as I found it a bit dumb for my taste but I know people who had terrible problems with the game even with the newest drivers and on quite powerfull PCs. I have also seen similar problems on the console version.
    So, stop with this "It was only the drivers!" crap, please. The engine has some problems of its own.

  • Obli #40 4 months ago

    @5h1nj1 You didn't play Rage. I played it on PS3 from start to finish. Yes, there is texture detail pop-in. That was the only 'terrible problem' I experienced. 360 version fully installed is much better. I think you're wrong. The console versions were robust. PC players with AMD graphics cards experienced the shitty end of the stick.

  • evild_edd #41 4 months ago

    Playing through RAGE on the 360 (installed) at the moment. Stunning game, super smooth, with fantastic shooting and solid driving/racing elements. If you approach it as being an FPS with additional elements, then you can't go to far wrong (it's not an RPG!).

    Just ploughing through Disc 2 now (about to tackle the Gearhead gang in their own back yard!) and thoroughly enjoying it.

    My only complaint is that I seem to have a terrible mental block in reaching the end of five finger fillet :p

  • slowbots #42 4 months ago

    Obviously noone here knows much about the games business. This "Standard business practice" in the game industry is referring to the culling of (usually) quite big teams of specialised teams that grow really large towards the end of a development cycle of most games. This means that after a game is released, teams that have worked on testing, QA, Text and other late development stuff are no longer needed and are let go. There is no sense for example in keeping 20 + testers around if a good playable code of the next game (Doom 4 in this case) is not going to be around for a couple of years.

    Note that they say they are still hiring developers (read : technically savy skilled labour) but there is no mention of where the redundansies are.

    Sad but true and has been done for the last gazzillion years(give or take a couple).

  • TURBOKILLFACE53 #43 4 months ago

    Should have sacked the Skyrim team, bunch of clunge monkeys!

  • cheeky-sod #44 4 months ago

    RAGE was just over hyped and turned out garbage. Stop making excuses..

  • drSchiwago #45 4 months ago

    If the layoffs are "normal" in a business context depends widely on the number of layoffs and if probably projects are delayed or not even started.

    The game itself was mostly a disappointment for me, on PC it didn't work well. With vanilla config even three new nvidia drivers didn't fully solve the texture streaming issues. Other problems were no SLI & DX11 support, the game cache didn't worked after installation.
    I was "stunned" by the low graphic quality in certain areas (e.g. looking at skyscrapers through a scope). Texture quality and esp. the (static) lightning was very unimpressive. Way to often I had to concentrate on the issues of "Rage" and at certain times I spent more time preparing screenshots of ugly environments instead of playing.The game worked best for me when driving around.

    The main/only focus of Rage was obviously console, so maybe the game work and perform much better on this platform, but this is beyond my personal experience.