Xbox CEO Confirms id Software Is Building Next Game

id Software is already working on its next game, and this time the confirmation comes from the top of Xbox. "Few studios have shaped the first-person shooter genre as much as @idSoftware. Slaughter Mode comes to DOOM: The Dark Ages | Revelations on Monday, and the team is already working on its next game," Xbox CEO Asha Sharma wrote on X, in a post marking Xbox's 25th anniversary on November 12, 2026. The studio says the untitled project is being developed by its teams in Texas and Frankfurt and will be directed by Hugo Martin.

Martin's name is the announcement's real information. He has directed all three modern Doom games and served as writer on the past two, so his involvement points toward a continuation of the formula that carried DOOM in 2016, Doom Eternal and DOOM: The Dark Ages. Sharma's post doesn't name the new project, and no title, genre or release window has been announced. Whether it's another Doom entry or something else entirely is unstated, and players shouldn't read the confirmation as a release date wearing a disguise.

The timing gives the short post its weight. It's the first official word on id Software's future since Xbox's mass layoffs in July 2026, which hit the studio two days after the Revelations expansion launched on July 7. The studio later said its team had been reduced to roughly the same size as when it made Doom in 2016, and that it would continue with QuakeCon in August as planned. A confirmed next game, with the series' director attached and two teams named, is the studio answering the question the layoffs left open: it still has a future tense.

The playable half of the announcement arrives first. Slaughter Mode is a free update for DOOM: The Dark Ages | Revelations landing Monday, November 16, 2026. It offers 19 arenas drawn from The Dark Ages and its Revelations expansion, with randomized roguelike-style runs. Challenge and weekly rewards unlock cosmetics including skins, backgrounds and soundtrack tracks, and checkpoints let players raise the difficulty for better rewards at a higher risk of losing their progress.

The sequence is the strategy. DOOM: The Dark Ages launched in May 2025, its Revelations expansion followed on July 7, 2026, and Slaughter Mode now extends the same game into the holiday season at no cost to owners, while the studio's next title develops out of sight. id keeps its current audience playing with one hand and builds whatever comes next with the other. What that next game is, Martin's teams in Texas and Frankfurt know. Everyone else has a confirmation, a director and a Monday update, in that order.

The anniversary framing was deliberate. Sharma chose an Xbox milestone post to say it, which puts id's next game on the platform's official record rather than in a rumor cycle, and the sentence she led with is a legacy claim: few studios have shaped the first-person shooter genre as much. That is the context the confirmation arrives in. id isn't a support studio being reassured in public. It's one of the genre's founding names, being told, on the record, that its next game is already underway, four months after the layoffs that made people ask whether it would be.