id Software co-director Marty Stratton says the Doom studio is now working “more closely with MachineGames than ever,” after about half of id’s staff exited in Xbox’s “reset” layoffs.
Stratton made the comments at a press event held the last week of October for the Revelations DLC for DOOM: The Dark Ages, the expansion id released in summer 2026. He said about half of the studio left as part of the restructuring under Xbox CEO Asha Sharma, and that leadership made a deliberate push to keep the studio on its feet afterward.
“We’re doing great. Not to handwave the [layoffs] away…everybody knows we had about half of our studio exit as part of that,” Stratton said. “But there was a very deliberate effort to make sure that we were incredibly viable coming out of that across everything we do, across game development and technology department.”
A partnership that predates the cuts
The tighter collaboration with MachineGames, the Uppsala studio behind the modern Wolfenstein games and 2024’s Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, is not a reaction to the layoffs, Stratton said. The two teams kicked the effort off earlier in 2026, before the cuts landed.
“We’re working more closely with MachineGames than ever. We’ve always had a very close partnership with them, but I think we’re at a point with technology development that both teams are incredibly talented and have incredibly talented engineers and we’re really on an amazing path that had started pre-[layoffs],” Stratton said. “We’re really excited about that. We’re both really really bullish on what we have ahead.”
MachineGames has built every one of its games on id Software’s idTech engine, which makes the technology pairing a natural fit. Both studios sit inside Bethesda under Xbox, where Sharma has said she wants development teams to double down on the biggest franchises, a goal Bethesda boss Jill Braff has echoed.
What id does next
With id now apparently finished with DOOM: The Dark Ages following the Revelations DLC, its next project is unannounced. MachineGames’ next game is heavily rumored to be Wolfenstein 3, though that remains speculation: studio head Jerk Gustafsson said only that the team is “not done with Wolfenstein yet,” and no co-development plan has been confirmed by either studio or Xbox.
