Doom co-creator John Romero has responded to the latest Xbox layoffs at id Software with a message of support for affected developers and a warning that the studio's history needs active preservation.
In a five-post Bluesky thread, Romero said he was "so sorry" for everyone at id Software hit by the cuts. His comments arrive after reports that the Doom studio was heavily affected by Xbox's latest restructuring, with the cuts landing during the launch week for DOOM: The Dark Ages Revelations.
"I know what it feels like to leave id while id goes on. It’s a strange and painful thing to step away from a place that holds so much of your work, friendships and history."
Romero co-founded id Software in 1991 and helped shape Doom, Quake and Wolfenstein 3D, three series that still define how people talk about first-person shooters. In the thread, he praised the developers who carried those names after his departure, saying DOOM, Quake and Wolfenstein are "not easy names to carry on" in the current industry.
"The last few games showed real care, skill and respect for what those worlds mean to people."
Romero says id's history cannot be left to chance
The sharper part of Romero's message was about preservation. He said id's history is "critically important to the history of games" and added that he has personally preserved the studio's early material from its Softdisk beginnings through August 6, 1996.
"I’ve preserved id’s complete early history from our start at Softdisk through to August 6, 1996, including materials and assets that, as far as I know, id itself no longer has. I hope someone is doing the same for the company’s ongoing legacy (the work, code, assets, stories and the people behind them)."
That concern lands differently after deep studio cuts. id Software makes modern Doom, but its technology and design history also run through the rise of shareware PC games, competitive deathmatch, modding culture and the shooter template that many later studios built from. Losing people from a studio like that also risks losing undocumented knowledge about how its games and tools were made.
Romero closed by saying he was thinking of everyone at id and everyone affected by the previous day's layoffs. He also pointed to Romero Games' own experience roughly a year earlier, when the studio faced layoffs and the cancellation of a publisher-backed shooter.
The layoffs are part of a wider Xbox reset
Microsoft's current gaming cuts are expected to remove roughly 3,200 roles across Xbox's 2027 fiscal year. The id Software reports followed broader upheaval across Microsoft's gaming division and ZeniMax, including a shift that puts Bethesda's biggest franchises at the center of Xbox's reset.
That makes Romero's preservation plea more than a nostalgic aside. If Xbox is reorganizing ZeniMax around major series such as Doom, Quake, Wolfenstein, Fallout and The Elder Scrolls, the people and materials behind those series become part of the question facing the publisher. The brands may remain valuable, but the knowledge behind them is harder to replace.
Microsoft has not publicly detailed the final studio-level impact at id Software. Until it does, the exact scale of the cuts remains based on reports and public posts from people around the studio.