id Software's Chris Hays Says Xbox Layoffs Make a New Doom 'Impossible'

Fifteen years is a long time to hold a job in games, and Chris Hays has held his at id Software through Doom, Doom Eternal, Doom 2016, and Doom: The Dark Ages. The studio's lead services programmer surfaced on the Well Played podcast this week, and the clip that hit X on August 7, 2026 is brutal in a way that almost no studio veteran is willing to be on the record. Hays does not think id can ship another Doom-sized game with the team that survived Microsoft's July layoffs, and he does not think Xbox is being honest about why.

It is hard to make a game that is AAA that is like we have done before with half the people, Hays said. And by hard I mean impossible. Entire departments are gutted. Entire disciplines are gone. So the reassurances that we are still the same id and we are still going to do things, well, first of all, we are not the same id. We are half the same id. That is the strongest public statement from a current id employee since Microsoft announced the 1,600 July cuts, with another 1,600 planned before the end of the year, roughly twenty percent of Xbox's total headcount.

Xbox told id what it could say, Hays claims

Hays added that id management has been given talking points and was told by Xbox what it could and could not say publicly. According to him, leadership is trying to keep morale from collapsing before more people jump ship. At the end of the day, most of it was just trying to tell us that, oh no, everything is fine. And things will be okay, Hays said. The same lines that they said publicly, like, oh well, [the studio is] the size of Doom 2016 or we are close to that same size, and so we shipped that game, so we could ship another game.

The host pushed back: if Xbox really thinks id is the same size as the Doom 2016 team, why are there visibly fewer names in the credits? Hays replied that there is a reason Xbox says close to, because it is less. Kotaku reached out to Xbox for clarification at the time of publication, and Xbox has not commented on the record. New Xbox boss Asha Sharma sent an internal email in July calling the cuts and studio divestitures the most significant restructure in Xbox history.

The Game Pass problem id cannot fix

Hays was just as direct about Game Pass. Because id Software is owned by Bethesda, which is owned by Xbox, every id game launches day one on Microsoft's subscription. When Bethesda's quarterly results show weak sales, Xbox reads it as a commercial failure. Hays does not buy the framing. I know that [id has] serious issues with how Game Pass is done. Whenever we see the financial reports that say that there were poor sales under Bethesda, like, what is a sale? If you have Game Pass, are you saying poor sales means a poor number of games sold? Cause of course, he said. [Xbox is not] doing a games sold business model.

That tension between Bethesda's internal numbers and Xbox's public narrative is now bleeding into the studio that actually shipped Doom: The Dark Ages to a strong critical reception in May 2025. The math Xbox wants from id and the math Bethesda needs to keep making games are no longer compatible, and the people inside id know it.

Community reaction lands hard

The clip has racked up real engagement. Kotaku's tweet of the story cleared forty-one thousand likes and thirteen million views within hours. The Spanish-language recap from eXtas1stv drew a hundred and fifty-four thousand likes and seventeen thousand reposts, with fans calling out Xbox by name. Most of the replies are not angry at id. They are angry at a parent company that bought one of the most respected developers in first-person shooters and treated the studio like a SaaS subscription, then cut it in half and asked it to ship the same kind of work with the people who happened to keep their jobs.

There is also a quieter read of the same clip. id Software is not the only Bethesda studio absorbing cuts, and Hays is one of the few current employees who has put his name on the frustration. The pattern across Xbox since Sharma took over has been aggressive cost reduction and a steady drumbeat of reassurance that the studios still shipping are the studios worth keeping. Hearing a fifteen-year veteran say we are not the same id and we are half the same id on a public podcast cuts through that messaging in a way no press release can.

What this means for the next id game

Hay's framing makes one thing clear: id Software is not currently set up to deliver another Doom-scale production on the timeline Xbox's roadmap assumes. The studio that built Doom 2016, Doom Eternal, and Doom: The Dark Ages used hundreds of people across art, animation, audio, design, and engineering. When entire departments are gutted, those gaps do not get filled by AI tools, by talking points, or by a subscription service that ships every id title day one. They get filled by scope cuts, by delays, or by a quiet pivot to something smaller.

For Microsoft, the cost of cutting id in half is not a smaller id. It is a smaller kind of game from the studio that just shipped a Doom that mattered. For players, that is the actual price of the round of layoffs Xbox is still selling as a restructure rather than a retreat. For Hays, who has survived fifteen years of every kind of pressure id has ever faced, the message is the simplest one. We are not the same id. We are half the same id. And we cannot make another Doom with what is left.