Xbox layoffs hit Id Software's engineering team, 60-70 devs cut from Obsidian

Microsoft's Xbox division cut deep into Id Software's engineering team and removed 60-70 developers from Obsidian, according to VGC. The layoffs hit Id's coding staff especially hard — the studio behind Doom Eternal and the upcoming Doom: The Dark Ages. Obsidian, fresh off Avowed's launch and working on The Outer Worlds 2, lost a significant chunk of its headcount.

The timing matters. Id shipped Doom: The Dark Ages last year, and Obsidian just released Avowed in February. Both studios have live-service commitments and unannounced projects. Cutting engineering capacity now means slower patch cycles, longer gaps between updates, and fewer resources for performance optimization.

This is bad news if you were hoping for meaningful post-launch work on Avowed's frame pacing issues or Doom's ray-tracing implementation. Smaller teams ship slower fixes. Microsoft has laid off thousands across Xbox studios since 2023 — Arkane Austin shut down entirely last year — but these cuts land on two studios PC gamers actually care about. If you bought Avowed at launch, expect a longer wait for performance patches.

See which settings still work while you wait for official fixes — user testing fills in when support teams get thinned out.