Id Software, the American video game developer that helped define the first-person shooter genre with titles such as Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake, has been hit by layoffs as part of a wave of industry cuts spanning 2024 and 2025. The studio, founded in 1991 by four former Softdisk employees — programmers John Carmack and John Romero, game designer Tom Hall, and artist Adrian Carmack — became a pioneer in 3D computer graphics and game engines.
Its engines have been widely used across the industry, and its history mirrors larger shifts in gaming, from technological innovation to corporate consolidation. id Software was acquired by ZeniMax Media in 2009, and ZeniMax itself was acquired by Microsoft in 2021. Now, the company joins a growing list of firms where the term “layoff” no longer carries its original meaning.
The Evolution of a Term
The word “layoff” originally described a temporary interruption in work, usually without pay. That definition has been quietly abandoned.
Today, a layoff almost always means permanent termination of employment, and the original sense now requires the qualifier “temporary” to be understood. This shift is not accidental. A range of euphemisms has proliferated to soften the blow. In the U.S. government employment sector, the standard term is “RIF,” short for reduction in force.
Under UK labour law, the term “redundancy” carries a specific legal meaning. But all these labels mask the same underlying mechanism: the permanent elimination of a position.
A layoff is not to be confused with wrongful termination. Layoffs are presented as the result of business reasons, such as personnel management or downsizing an organization. The distinction matters for reputation, for severance, and for the legal framework.
Another related term is “attrition,” meaning positions vanish as workers quit or retire. The language has evolved to match a practice that has become institutionalized.
The Financial Incentive
Downsizing became a popular corporate practice in the 1980s and early 1990s. The claim was that reducing headcount delivered better shareholder value by cutting employer costs.
Empirical evidence supports the notion that such announcements can move markets. A study of 391 downsizing announcements by S&P 100 firms between 1990 and 2006 found that layoff announcements produced a substantial increase in stock prices. The gain was larger for companies that had conducted prior layoffs. The authors of that study concluded that stock price manipulation alone creates sufficient motivation for publicly traded corporations to adopt regular layoffs.
Research on downsizing in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan suggests that management now regards it as one of the preferred routes for declining organizations — a way to cut unnecessary costs and improve performance. The broader picture is one of a practice that has become institutionalized.
What began as a temporary measure has been reframed as a permanent tool of corporate finance.
An Institutionalized Practice
id Software’s place in this landscape is instructive. As an American developer known for advancing PC gaming technologies, its work on Wolfenstein 3D — often cited as the first true first-person shooter — and Doom, which popularized the genre, and Quake, which marked id’s first true 3D FPS, established the company as a technical leader.
Its influence extends beyond its own games. The studio’s game engines have been widely licensed across the industry. But even a company with such a legacy, now under the umbrella of Microsoft, is not immune to the broader trend.
The euphemisms keep multiplying, but the outcome is the same: permanent elimination of positions, often presented as a necessary business decision. The question going forward is whether the market’s appetite for such announcements will sustain the cycle, or whether the long-term costs to workforce stability will eventually force a reckoning.
For now, layoffs at firms like id Software serve as a reminder that the term has been permanently redefined.
