By Stephen Totilo, Wed Jun 24 2009
In an interview with Kotaku, id’s John Carmack and Todd Hollenshead explained how changing circumstances with Activision and other studios spurred id’s sale to Bethesda parent ZeniMax.id Software is still a development studio that commands respect, but it’s one that had found itself not quite fitting in of late, its principals told us during a phone interview tied to the announcement of the company’s sale to ZeniMax.
One of the problems lately, Carmack told Kotaku, is that id just wasn’t a good fit with big publishers these days. "As we were shopping Rage and Doom and upcoming stuff, talking about all of that, we were getting a pretty consistent line from all the publishers," he said. "They were willing to continue to fund our working with partner companies for all of these but pretty much ever publisher said, ‘Well, it would be worth much more to us if you would grow your studio and do more of your own work internally. That’s why we already started to staff up to do Doom 4 internally. So things were already moving in that direction."
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Well I always knew id software as a company has been weak and lagging behind in the development department for many years now. And to be honest It wouldn’t have surprised me if the news was more about them going out of business. With games taking forever to be released one can only draw the conclusion that id software didn’t have the developer muscle to back up the marketing spin it was once known for. Seeing them being bought out is not at all surprising to me. I’m a fan of their games but when you have John Carmack going off and playing with rockets or wasting time trying to develop cell phone games instead of staying focused on his company one can not be shocked that id as a company has gotten lazy and wasn’t fitting in anywhere.
So do you see this sellout as a positive or negative? Depends on how you look at it. More money pumped into the development stream doesn’t always equate to better game development but it helps. And the way id has been under producing of late and being left behind by other major developers in the industry, any help id software can get should help, hopefully. However, out of the 3 major companies that started the FPS gaming scene – 3d Realms failed now out of business – id Software sells out now owned becoming the peasants and Epic Games makers of Unreal seems to be the only one that got it right with multiple Titles and licensees in the market and still going strong. Which proves Being one of the first in a business doesn’t always guarantee constant success and if you sit back and get lazy for too long you will definately be left behind and be known as a blip in history. So lets hope for the best.
Comment by J. TECH — June 24, 2009 @ 8:39 pm