Civvie 11 Blasts Xbox for Gutting id Software After Doom's Decade of Dominance

Shooter historian and YouTuber Civvie 11 has gone on record calling out Microsoft's treatment of id Software following the latest round of Xbox layoffs, which will cut more than 3,000 staff across the company. While Microsoft has stopped short of outright closing studios, the cuts at id — creators of Doom — have reportedly gone deep enough to raise serious questions about the team's ability to ship another game.

Civvie made the comments in a recent video ostensibly covering Quake expansions, but he didn't let the elephant in the room go unaddressed. "Microsoft gambled and lost," he said. "All of the layoffs infuriate me but there's something especially gross and predatory about bleeding id like this." He went on to credit the studio's recent output — Doom 2016, Doom Eternal, and The Dark Ages — as the most influential action games of the last decade, arguing they revived a franchise many had written off and set the template for an entire wave of fast, brutal first-person shooters. "A mostly unrestrained id put out some of the best action games ever created," he said, "and now it's going the way of all good studios. Chopped up, torn apart and forced to be less passionate, less creative, less themselves."

Civvie's frustration carries weight because he's spent years documenting exactly the kind of renaissance id helped spark. His channel covers the boomer shooter revival in depth — from Blood and Thief to Cruelty Squad — and his most-watched video is his breakdown of Doom 2016, the game he argues kicked the whole thing off. Doom 2016 arrived at a moment when big-budget shooters had drifted toward cover mechanics and cinematic pacing; id's response was to strip all of that out and build something loud, fast, and unapologetically violent. The games that followed — from Ultrakill to Turbo Overkill — owe a visible debt to that design philosophy.

Civvie isn't optimistic about what comes next, framing the cuts as an inevitable product of how the games industry operates under investor pressure. "None of this surprises me," he said. "This is how everything operates." With id's headcount now significantly reduced and no official word from Microsoft on the studio's future projects, the community is left wondering whether the team that made Doom Eternal can still function as a creative force — or whether that version of id Software is already gone.