A former id Software developer who was laid off around the release of Doom: The Dark Ages – Revelations has described a brutal development crunch, claiming some days stretched to 17 hours as the team raced to finish the expansion.

The release of Doom: The Dark Ages – Revelations in July should have been a moment of celebration for id Software. Instead, it coincided with Microsoft’s sweeping layoffs that affected thousands of employees across the company and numerous Xbox studios.

Now, former id Software producer Andrew Willis has spoken about what development of the expansion was like during its final months – and the picture he paints isn’t pretty.

According to Willis, developers spent weeks working extremely long hours to get Revelations finished, only for some of those same employees to lose their jobs around the time the DLC shipped.

Revelations Developers Were Working Up to 17-Hour Days

Willis says the final two months of development involved working at least 12 hours per day, with some individual days stretching considerably longer.

“I know I hit 17 [hours] a couple of days. It was brutal, and the majority of the game got made in three or four months,” Willis said.

Those hours came with significant personal sacrifices.

Willis explained that there were multiple days when he didn’t see his son because of the amount of time being spent getting Revelations ready for release.

“And it’s not just me, but everybody on the team was really putting in the hours,” he added.

According to Willis, some developers with decades of experience across Hollywood and the games industry described Revelations as the worst crunch they had ever experienced.

The Crunch Wasn’t Officially Mandatory

Willis stressed that id Software didn’t explicitly mandate the additional hours.

Instead, he described a situation where developers were assigned so much work that completing everything within normal working hours simply wasn’t realistic.

“You get loaded up with 60 hours of work in a week, and what do you do?” Willis said.

Developers could theoretically have delivered a less polished version of their work, but Willis explained that doing so would mean releasing something below both their own standards and what players expect from a studio like id Software.

He described the situation as a form of “pseudo-induced crunch” – overtime that might not technically be mandatory but becomes difficult to avoid because of workloads and expectations surrounding the final product.

DOOM: The Dark Ages – Revelations DLC Review – A Brutal Expansion That Reminds Us Why DOOM Still Matters

Developers Were Laid Off as Revelations Shipped

The circumstances surrounding the expansion’s release made the situation even more painful.

Revelations launched during the same week Microsoft announced approximately 3,200 layoffs, with cuts affecting studios throughout its Xbox organization.

Id Software was among those heavily impacted.

Willis was one of the employees who lost their jobs around the expansion’s release after spending months helping get it across the finish line.

“You spend so much of your energy and hours of your life, and sacrifice a bunch of things, to get something out the door, and then they lay you off the day before,” Willis said. “It’s such a wild feeling.”

The timing puts a particularly uncomfortable spotlight on the human cost behind the development of Revelations.

Players received a substantial new Doom expansion, but some of the developers responsible for completing it were losing their jobs at almost exactly the same time.

Id Software Was Hit Hard by Microsoft’s Layoffs

Reports following Microsoft’s cuts suggested that id Software lost a significant portion of its workforce, including experienced developers working across several important areas of production.

Exactly what that means for the studio’s future has remained the subject of debate.

Co-studio director Hugo Martin previously pushed back against some of the more alarming descriptions of id Software’s situation, explaining that the remaining team is roughly comparable in size to the group responsible for 2016’s Doom.

Others within the studio have expressed greater concern.

Id Software lead services provider Chris Hayes has criticized the wider Xbox layoffs and questioned whether modern AAA games comparable to Doom can realistically be developed with significantly smaller teams.

Whatever comes next, id Software will clearly be operating under very different circumstances following the cuts.

What Comes After Doom: The Dark Ages?

Revelations remains the only expansion released for Doom: The Dark Ages, and id Software hasn’t announced what its next major project will be.

The studio has decades of history behind franchises including Doom and Quake, but Microsoft’s layoffs have created significant uncertainty around what its next production will look like and how large the development team behind it will be.

Willis’ account also raises another uncomfortable question about the sustainability of AAA development.

Working 12-hour days – sometimes reaching 17 hours – to meet a release target would already be difficult under normal circumstances. Doing so only to be laid off as that project reaches players makes the situation considerably harder to ignore.

For the developers who sacrificed their personal time to finish Revelations, the expansion’s release ended up representing something very different from the milestone it should have been.

Doom: The Dark Ages – Revelations launched in July 2026 and is currently the game’s only major expansion. Id Software has not yet revealed its next project.

What do you think about Willis’ comments on the development of Revelations and the state of AAA game development? Let us know in the comments below.