// PC GAMER — GAMING
id Software dev says mass layoffs like Microsoft's are weakening the games industry, because developers 'don't have the incentive to care anymore'
"A lot of gamers, even if they don't know it, they can feel it's not right. There's something wrong."
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At the end of last month, id Software lead services programmer Chris Hayes offered a blunt appraisal of Xbox's management during an interview with YouTube channel Auf ein Bier, saying Microsoft's repeated mass layoffs have proved that its leadership "fundamentally don't understand art."
Elsewhere in the interview, Hayes expanded the scope of his criticism beyond the immediate damage wrought by the latest round of Xbox cuts. Looking at the industry more broadly, Hayes, who's still a Microsoft employee, says mass layoffs and nearsighted cost cutting are producing worse games, because they're denying game developers the opportunity—and motivation—to improve their craft.
While major companies like Microsoft might brag about the "great IPs and studios" that they own, Hayes said they seem incapable of understanding that they regularly harm their own capability to produce anything of value with those brands and developers.
"It is our experience together, our working together, and our past experiences that make the studio good. Yeah, you could just throw away half [of your developers] and bring in more later if you happen to need more number of hours to fill out the check boxes that you want," Hayes said. "But then you're just going to end up with a mediocre game, and people aren't going to be happy, and everyone will know it. And that's the long-term thinking that doesn't seem to be present."
According to Hayes, the biggest publishers and companies in the games industry have lost their understanding of "the actual reality of what makes a good game": Quality, he says, comes from the way a studio's developers have learned to work together—and, as is often the case in creative work, from being able to learn from failures.
"Failures are important, too. Early on when id got bought by ZeniMax and ZeniMax got bought by Microsoft, one of the big selling points was you can have failures and it doesn't mean the end of the business," Hayes said. "In a bigger umbrella, you can be riskier."
The assumption had been that, because Xbox comprised so many studios, those studios were insulated from some of the fallout when any individual creative risk didn't pay off, provided the developers were still hitting more than missing.
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