Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#391

Post by j_w » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 7:57 PM UTC

tranceylc wrote: post #373

georgeecollins wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Craft > sales. Great craftsmanship always sells, That is exactly how I perceived the game industry to be before I worked in it. Now I know that there are many objectively excellent or even innovative or influential games that do not sell, or also do not sell well enough to support their development costs.

Could you give an example of something excellent and either innovative or influential that did not sell well? It’s a question I have sought to answer myself. Especially if you can find one that doesn’t take development costs into account. So I’m looking for an “objectively” (figuratively) excellent game, that has not sold many copies at all. A game on steam that should be popular but isn’t. Do you have any examples?

Commenting just so I can check later what he comes back with.

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#392

Post by tranceylc » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 7:57 PM UTC

Jepacor wrote: post #387

tranceylc wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn’t like that, and it is true. Lots of games in a specific engine share common traits. From physics, to rendering, to more specific engine stuff (think of using the full suite of lumen/nanite/ue5 rendering whatever). Even the character actor can sometimes feel similar. Visuals are by far the most indicative thing of an engine. Don’t forget about unreal’s awful shader stutters. calling that ridiculous is extremel…

Hi-Fi Rush and Guilty Gear Strive are both Unreal Engine games and they look nothing like a "standard Unreal look" being both highly stylised.

I don’t think anyone was claiming that it was impossible. Unreal is literally source-available so of course

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#393

Post by phendrenad2 » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 7:59 PM UTC

LarsDu88 wrote: post #63

Microsoft, one the world's greatest monopolists, bequeaths a game engine monopoly unto Epic Games, in one the biggest corporate blunders of all time. If they were smarter about this, they would commoditize their compliment and open source the Doom The Dark Ages engine just like John Carmack did with the Quake 3 engine.

That isn't commoditizing their compliment. Commoditizing their compliment is what Unity and Unreal do, they give you the game engine for free (unless you're very, very successful) and they sell you the assets.

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#394

Post by vvillena » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 7:59 PM UTC

formerly_proven wrote: post #374

markus_zhang wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is another benefit of a custom engine — you built it to fit your workflow, so you could be extremely productive with all kinds of tools built specifically for this workflow. UE or Unity do not consider your specific cases. The problem is that companies are not willing to groom new engineers to get familiar with the code.

UE is also just not a good engine. If you reduce "what is a 3D game engine" really hard it is "framework for running an input-process-output loop while consistently rendering audio and video". UE fails at the latter (factually unfixable shadder stuttering issues). A pragmatist might consider the taxonomy and say UE is therefore not a game engine. Unreal seems to be a great framework for assembling and generating cont…

Isn't the shader stuttering an issue with games refusing to compile shaders ahead of time?

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#395

Post by wizzwizz4 » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 7:59 PM UTC

yifanl wrote: post #331

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, I don't want to rule all of society! I'd just like to be able to contribute to it meaningfully. Rewriting some corporate app from React to Flutter, replacing one set of bugs with another, is not a good use of resources. I can do so much more! … but the people most in need of my skills do not have the money to pay for my food, housing and electricity, even if I were to forego all other luxuries. I don't think mys…

Rule's maybe too strong a word, but knowing that you have all the good ideas and wanting to structure everything to support those good ideas... it's not a bad word for it. Like, it's certainly easy to point out that there are things that aren't being done efficiently, but finding the balance on how to prioritize the right efficiencies is the why society exists.

I don't have all the good ideas. I have probably three good ideas, and I'm not sure which those are. Working on my own good ideas is for my personal time. For my actual job, I am perfectly content with working on other people's good ideas, of which there are too many to count – but I can't do that, because the people who'd most be helped by me working on other people's good ideas do not control the flow of money, and cannot redirect any money to me in exchange for my labour.

I don't want to structure everything to support my good ideas: I want to structure everything to support everybody else's good ideas. We can surely do better than the status quo, which is to structure everything to support a few billionaires' bad ideas. (Why are the only business models for the web "gatekeep" and "surveillance advertising"? Why are we burning valuable hydrocarbons when we orbit a star? Why is the pornography industry so abusive? Why are our social lives mediated by the anorexia rectangle – what happened to local third spaces? Why do we even have the anorexia rectangle – what happened to personal computing? When everyone knows what's wrong with the municipal plumbing, including the people whose job it is to work on it, why is nobody permitted to fix it? Why are so many resources being poured into generative AI to solve problems that we already have cheaper solutions to, if only they were permitted to be be implemented? Why war?)

I do not labour under the delusion that I can fix any of these issues, or would be able to fix them if I were "in charge" (whatever that means). But I know that these problems are not intrinsic features of the universe: they can be fixed in principle.

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#396

Post by dymk » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 8:02 PM UTC

falcor84 wrote: post #305

dymk wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s nothing like a romantic relationship, and it does say something about msft: they failed at planning and managing company resources, and as a result fired a bunch of people

It sounds like you're fully agreeing with me that it has pretty much nothing to do with the value of the employees and essentially everything with how the employees no longer fit the company's plans.

I think if you read the words I wrote you’ll find I did not agree with your framing

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#397

Post by simoncion » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 8:05 PM UTC

garciansmith wrote: post #84

Catloafdev wrote: post #9

RIP to the end of an era. Was IdTech used outside of Id? Or was it just a Doom series thing as of recently?

Skin Deep by Blendo games, which came out in 2025, used Id Tech 4 (despite its age). Super fun game with a ton of personality!

I both completed and enjoyed Skin Deep, but liked Blendo's previous game "Quadrilateral Cowboy" a fair bit more. They're not the same sort of game, but both are quite stylish and both use id Tech 4.

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#398

Post by grg0 » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 8:08 PM UTC

Refreeze5224 wrote: post #354

wnevets wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It lets you treat your employees as a replaceable commodity This has been the objective of the tech industry for years

It is a fundamental feature of capitalism. There is an inherent tension between employers and workers, in that workers represent a cost center that can never be totally eliminated, and has a lot of undesirable features, such as: being alive, having opinions, being able to talk/whistle-blow, requiring bathrooms, bathroom breaks, and safe working conditions, banding together to increase their collective power and reduc…

> and you as an individual are definitely better off negotiating alone versus entire corporations.

This sounds so comical when put that way. But you still see people defending that posture even on this forum. Psyops was definitely the most effective trick. And then those corporations went beyond the bounds of private enterprise and captured government as well. If anyone has any doubt that unchecked capitalism is fundamentally at odds with democracy, they are missing the forest for the trees.

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#399

Post by kibwen » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 8:09 PM UTC

BikiniPrince wrote: post #359

solatic wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, but idTech is almost by definition that "novelty" kind of engine. And it did help id to sell more games. It's just apparently not enough.

Id made games to demo their engine. No one is going to buy an engine without any games. They don’t even sell idTech anymore. It’s used for their games which are not making any money. No game sales doesn’t support the reasoning they should keep the engine around.

Except that the obvious reason their recent games see lackluster sales is because they're on Gamepass, which precludes needing to buy the game to play it.

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#400

Post by Kapura » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 8:09 PM UTC

ndiddy wrote: post #19

I think we'll see stuff like this continue to happen over time. As a game company, having your own engine means that you have to be able to cultivate internal expertise in your tooling. Your employees will know this and could do bad things like ask for more money because they know that replacing them would significantly hurt productivity. Meanwhile, laying off your whole engine team and switching to UE5 means that yo…

This is why i chop down all the peach trees at the end of a harvest. If they get too big they might start wanting more water and fertilizer; it's much simpler to treat them as interchangeable saplings.