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Could Doom 3 be a Xbox Exclusive?
acehole writes "Doom III, id's latest and greatest in the realm of first-person shooters, may be coming out as an Xbox exclusive... if Microsoft has its way." This story is very brief, has no real evidence, and should be treated as entirely speculative. I'd be sad if Doom 3 required me to use the X-Box's controller. It's just not right without a mouse!
Don't trust the slashdot editors, they usually screw it up. If you RTA, which in this case takes only a few seconds, you'll see that the rumour is only that it will be available on X-Box and no other *consoles* - the deal MS is supposedly offering concerns exclusivity in the console market and nothing else. And if the rumour is true, it's basically free money for id, since they were not planning to port it to any other consoles anyway.
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I hardly see anything wrong with buying exclusive rights for games and development houses in order to make your console more attractive to the consumer. Nintendo did this (bought Rare), and I thought Sony did something similar with Square. This is hardly new behavior, and there's nothing inherently wrong with this. See it as a method of adding value by buying rights to things.
If you want Doom3 on a console, you'll have to buy an Xbox. That's the plan. It's not monopolistic, nor is it morally wrong. It's just a good way of doing business.
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
Don't be too sure. id knows how powerful its games are in the computer world. When a new game is released Doom, Quake, Quake 2, Quake 3, a mini-worldwide upgrade in hardware generally comes as well. I got to talk with Todd Hollenshead one time and he seems like a pretty shrewd dude in terms of business. They will weigh the pros and cons of only releasing to one console platform and it come out a little something like this.
((Total Projected Sales of units between each of the other consoles) * 25%??? exclusivitiy bonus for the XBox) - (Development Costs to Port to other systems)
If MS is offering more then that then they probably do it. id is powerful enough to demand that sort of deal and MSFT is rich and desperate enough to make that kind of deal. Guarantee you they hit a number like that, they would make it an X-Box exclusive.
Considering that John Carmack wrote a ways back that the XBox probably _did_ have the hardware to handle Doom3, albeit cut down a touch, I don't really see your theory having much support in reality.
Remember, the console only has to run it at 640x480, no AA, and on only one set of hardware. Hand-tweaked assembly isn't going to happen for each computer platform, but I certainly could see it for a single console. How the leaked Doom3 alpha runs on your P4 2.4ghz is not really a good measure of how the final version might run on an XBox (or PC, for that matter).
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
If Microsoft splashes enough money id would bite. Like everyone id has it's price. When money comes into play everyone is a whore.
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One is born into aristocracy, but mediocrity can only be achieved through hard work.
Keep in mind that Microsoft has a long and rich tradition of buying anyone that makes better products than they do that they can't otherwise quash.
Remember Bungie, once pretty much the only significant Mac-only gaming company?
IIRC, id is a privately-owned company, but what if *you* were Carmack and MS offered to fund *your* rocket-making experiment, plus more Ferraris? Would you at least consider an exclusive license on one game?
I mean, here's what I'm saying. Carmack is a really damn good software engineer, and id is a really good company. Carmack's done tons and tons of work for Linux and other platforms -- he's been a powerful OpenGL ally, he's pushed Linux gaming, wrote large portions of the XFree86 GLX 3d driver for my Matrox card as volunteer work, has released all his games crossplatform (and I think id has consistently lost money on Linux releases). Lots of interest in Linux gaming came about *because* of his work, so he's indirectly responsible for much Linux gaming.
Yet, does him doing all this justify everyone expecting him to say no to lots of money *again*?
May we never see th
Frankly, I don't know if either the PS2 or GC could handle Doom III. The PS2 doesn't have as much horsepower, and the GC's graphics core is rather fixed-function. Frankly, even on the XBox, the graphics will be diminished, as the XBox's GF3 core is a far cry from the GeForceFX and the Radeon 9700/9800 cores, which are more or less required to have decent performance with all the options on. Doom III has a ridiculous list of features, including stencil shadows, which generally triple the polycount of a given scene.
I personally could care less if ANY of the consoles get Doom III. I'm a big console fan, but some genres (namely FPS's and RTS's) are just better with PC-style input devices. By the same token, I'd probably never buy Soul Calibur or DOA or Zelda for the PC, if they ever came out.
Lex orandi, lex credendi.
Exactly! Id Software is John Carmack and John Carmack is Id Software. John Carmack is the kind of guy that has his games ported to Linux out of the goodness of his heart, not because it is making him money.
Furthermore, John Carmack is also the same guy that releases his game engines under the GPL, once they are past their prime. Finally, John Carmack has also worked on open source projects... if I remember correctly, he helped develop Matrox drivers for Linux.
Also throw in the fact that the openness of the PC allows and the openness of Id Software's previous games veritably created the mod scene that spawned such things as Threewave CTF, Team Fortress, Rocket Arena... and arguably Half-Life, Counter-Strike, etc... Not releasing a PC port would kill this aspect of the community, or at least it would leave Id Software out of it.
What makes you say it's not true? Did you read the article at all anyway? The article states that Microsoft is courting id Software to get Doom 3 to be a console exclusive on XBox. What's so unbelievable on that? I wouldn't doubt that Microsoft is courting them. Why wouldn't they? The game will obviously still be out on PC (as the article also states). Regardless, XBox is the only logical console to port the game to as it would look like ass on a PS2. And id would make a pretty penny off of it from MS, as well.
If you actually read things, you'd realize that people are talking about the exclusive console version of the game. It's getting released on the PC no matter what. id isn't stupid.