Laid-Off Doom Developers Start Their Own Studio to Make a Shooter

Hidden Horses, an employee-owned studio of more than 20 former id Software staffers, plans to crowdfund a single-player FPS called Danger Pay.

The layoffs at Doom studio id Software hit a day before the team's new expansion shipped, one laid-off developer says in a new documentary. "Just wild that they would attack it like that the day before we release our DLC," the developer says in the film, according to 80 Level.

Now more than 20 of those developers have started their own studio, Hidden Horses. It's owned by its employees, and its first pitch to players is a shooter called Danger Pay that they want to fund on Kickstarter, VGC reported Thursday. Put simply, the people Xbox let go are asking Doom fans to pay for the next game themselves.

The cut was deep. 80 Level put it at around half of id, part of a wider Xbox cut of 3,200 jobs. GamesIndustry.biz counted about 136 id employees laid off in July, and id said then that the team it kept was about as big as the one that made Doom in 2016. People still worried whether half a staff could keep the studio's in-house game engines running.

Some of the people who did that work are on the new studio's staff page. Blue's News lists Dustin Land, formerly principal engine programmer on idTech, and Todd Boyce, formerly lead VFX artist. Many of them have worked side by side for a decade, which Boyce called a rare chance in the documentary, VGC reported.

Co-founder Andrew Willis says the reviews sold him on the idea. Critics and players were praising the Revelations expansion for Doom: The Dark Ages, and some called it the best entry since the 2016 reboot. "The demand is there, the supply side is there," he says in the documentary, VGC reported.

The studio's own statement promises to put long-term health ahead of quarterly returns and gameplay ahead of monetization tricks. Willis told GamesIndustry.biz the point of employee ownership is that developers share in the studio's success, so it's more than another job.

Danger Pay is a single-player, first-person shooter set inside a lethal game show, and the emcee is a sinister AI. The studio cites 1987's The Running Man and the arcade shooter Smash TV as inspirations. The Kickstarter page was listed as coming soon, Blue's News reported. The studio says the goal will depend on the first project's timeline and costs, and it hasn't given a figure.

What that money buys is unglamorous: licenses, hardware and healthcare. 80 Level says the rollout will also include podcasts, Q&A sessions and a promotional beer. But insurance is the line that shows what's at stake: nobody's paying these people yet.

Rendering programmer Regan Carver, another co-founder, describes the trade plainly in the documentary. At id, the money was steady but the company stopped caring about him, he says. Now it's the other way around. "We know we all care about each other, but all we have to do now is succeed," he says in the film, GamesIndustry.biz reported.

Source: videogameschronicle.com, retrieved November 12, 2026. Other sources: 80.lv, gamesindustry.biz, bluesnews.com, web.archive.org.