The numbers landed this week with the dull thud of another corporate spreadsheet. id Software, the studio behind Doom, saw 136 positions eliminated as part of Xbox’s latest round of 3,200 cuts, according to a Texas WARN notice and reporting from multiple outlets. That leaves the Richardson office and its remote staff decimated, with sources telling Kotaku the id Tech engine team has been reduced to a single employee and institutional knowledge essentially erased.

Pitches that were floating around the studio before the axe fell— including a John Wick-style first-person melee game codenamed Fury and concepts tied to a new Perfect Dark entry—never made it past the incubation stage. Doom: The Dark Ages just received its Revelations expansion, yet no new full projects sit greenlit, and even multiplayer DLC ideas remain in limbo. Bethesda leadership has signaled a shift toward “strongest franchises,” leaving open questions about where Doom ranks in that hierarchy now.

One former employee described the studio as having been “nuked into the dirt” and reduced to support-studio size. With roughly three-quarters of the headcount gone from a team that stood around 185 employees late last year, the path forward for new id-led titles looks narrower than a narrow corridor in Hell itself. The remaining staff are left wondering how any substantial game gets shipped without rebuilding entire departments from scratch.