Laid-Off Id Software Devs Launch Employee-Owned Studio Hidden Horses

A group of Id Software developers hit by Xbox's mass layoffs has formed an independent, employee-owned studio called Hidden Horses. The team includes more than 20 former Id developers, artists, and designers, and it plans to fund its first project, the single-player FPS Danger Pay, through Kickstarter.

Ownership as the founding idea

The studio's central pitch is that everyone who works there holds a stake in what they make. Co-founder and executive producer Andrew Willis described the thinking: "We're creating a studio where the developers share in its success and have a commitment to it beyond just another job. I think that when people have a stake in something's success, they are more committed to it."

Hidden Horses says this structure will "empower individual developers while maintaining the focused decision-making necessary to build ambitious games."

Danger Pay and the Kickstarter

The studio is launching a Kickstarter campaign for Danger Pay. According to the studio, the money will cover "the typical things needed to start a business and finance game development, including licenses, hardware, and healthcare." The initial funding goal will reflect the timeline and costs of that first project.

Trading one risk for another

Co-founder and rendering programmer Regan Carver spoke about the move in a video documenting the studio's founding. He said he had been carrying two kinds of risk at Id: whether the company could succeed, and whether it cared about him.

"One was, can we succeed, which was a given because we were an established company. We had money coming in. We were making good stuff. And the other was, does the company care about me? For a while, that was true, and then it stopped," Carver said.

Hidden Horses reverses that balance, in his telling. "Whereas with this venture, it's like trading one for the other. We know we all care about each other, but all we have to do now is succeed. I've done the former. It didn't work out. I'm ready to do the latter, being able to do what we want and talk through what our ideas are."

What happened at Id

In July, approximately 136 Id employees were laid off. The studio maintained afterward that it still had the crew it needed to build the games and tech it is known for, though there were concerns about whether a team roughly half the size could keep its proprietary game engines running.

Id addressed that in a statement: "The team today is about the same size we were when making Doom (2016). We have always had a flat studio where everyone is a maker, and we will remain true to that philosophy moving forward."

The developer added: "We are focused on supporting each other and the team members impacted. We're going to keep building the great games and tech that have defined us for the past 35 years."

Hidden Horses has not yet named a funding target for the Kickstarter, which will be set to match what Danger Pay needs to get made.