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ZeniMax, Parent Company of Bethesda, Buys id Software
CelticLo writes "ZeniMax Media Inc., parent company of noted game publisher Bethesda Softworks, today announced it has completed the acquisition of legendary game studio id Software, creators of world-renowned games such as Doom, Quake, Wolfenstein, and its upcoming title, Rage. In an interview with Kotaku, John Carmack said, 'We're really getting kind of tired competing with our own publishers in terms of how our titles will be featured. And we've really gotten more IPs than we've been able to take advantage of. And working with other companies hasn't been working out as spectacularly as it could. So the idea of actually becoming a publisher and merging Bethesda and ZeniMax on there [is ideal.] It would be hard to imagine a more complementary relationship. They are triple A, top-of-the-line in what they do in the RPGs. And they have no overlap with all the things we do in the FPSes.' The press release confirmed that id's projects will remain under Carmack's control."
Looks like they might have a bonafide Atari stomping machine.
There is a war going on for your mind.
I was kind of hoping a new one would come out with the arrival of the new movie.
So after reading about Zenimax on wikipedia, it said that Dr. Chris Weaver was forced out of the company. (Dual Doctorates at MIT). And zenimax didn't pay its 1.2 million severance in the contract.
Kinda interesting, Weaver broke into Zenimax's email server and used the copies in court. So the appeals court dismissed his case due prejudice. The other interesting thing is the CEO of Zenimax was in a banking fraud scandal and banned from banking industry by the feds.
Doesnt sound like a great team heading it up. I bet this comes back to bite Carmack in the ass down the road.
I am surprised. Wolfenstein is based on Doom 3 engine, which is OpenGL. Isn't the alledged switch for the future engines ?
Also, I wonder if Doom 3 engine will be GPLed. id always GPLed their code after a while.
Zenimax with Bethesda makes great games with crappy software.
ID makes crappy games with great software.
Either this is going to be GREAT GAMES WITH GREAT SOFTWARE or CRAPPY GAMES WITH CRAPPY SOFTWARE.
I honestly can't think of a good ID game in the sense of a contemporary game. BRILLIANT technology. Great game engines, but the games themselves were always lack luster. In short: If it moves, it dies. That was it.
Doom series was nearly devoid of any literary content. It was literally just shoot stuff. Fun mind you but nothing to write home about.
Fallout 3 shows you can have an excellent game structured around bug ridden crap code.
Imagine ID's team doing the coding with the BETTER half doing the rest. Pure magic.
OR A COMPLETE DISASTER AS THEY BRING OUT THE WORST IN ONE ANOTHER.
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
As long as I get my next Elder Scrolls fix (and it's still single-player and anywhere near as good as Oblivion), Bethesda can do no wrong.
In the meantime, howsabout an official version of Morroblivion? I'd pay good money for that!
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
Sounds like Carmack may be setting things in motion to shift his attention to Armadillo Aerospace.
Next thing we know, he'll be performing secret experiments with teleportation... we all know how that story turns out.
Seriously, Bethesda has been doing FPS/RPGs with both Oblivion and Fallout 3, which use the same engine.
I don't have any idea how relevant that is to the Quake engine, but to pretend it's totally irrelevant is a bit silly.
Considering that the Bethesda engine is somewhat buggy, what with people falling through to the void and glitching through walls, what would be nice is if future Bethesda FPS/RPGs used the Quake engine for their graphics and rendering.
If I understand correctly, the Quake engine is already packaged for third parties to purchase and use, and other people have used it, so it shouldn't be incredibly hard. And it would let the Bethesda people concentrate on the RPG part.
OTOH, the Bethesda people have gotten Obsidian (Of KOTOR and NWN2 fame) to do Fallout 3: New Vegas, so apparently they don't want to do RPGs either!
Does anyone else find the game industry very confusing? We've got developers and publishers, but they're often the same company, but they'll do things like develop one game and have someone else publish it, and then publish another game that someone else develops, and then develop and publish a game...it's chaos.
And that's not counting all the 'sub' brands that companies like Atari and EA own. And the actual owners of the property the game is developed from.
Someone should make a 'mindmap' java program online showing all game companies, their relationship with other companies, and all games that have been worked on and by whom.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
ID still makes games? I havent played an ID game since Doom 3.
I agree. They can't compete in their traditional market due to capital. Look at the kind of money Activison can put behind a Call of Duty production, let alone the marketing. iD, being a fairly independent developer and thus capable of paying for their own development, doesn't really stand a chance when it's competing against a publisher funded project where the publishers have a vested financial interest in the title's success. iD didn't leverage their projects enough so competing with the likes of Inifinity Ward, who used the traditional "publisher funded" approach, just isn't possible. Their publishers simply didn't make enough money off iD's "niche" titles and self-funded approach. iD's previous organic growth provided immense stability and financial independence, but it severely limited how quickly they could expand and thus compete in a rapidly changing marketplace.
Around one year ago Carmack said Doom 3 will GPLed right about now. Few months away at most, supposedly.
One that hath name thou can not otter
Valve build on what 3d realms did with duke3d, and just went from there, making more and more fleshed out worlds, and encounters, more and more interactive environments. Id just remade Doom 2/quake 1 over and over with better graphics. They don't oven make the best engines anymore (CryEngine 3).
Graphics hardly make a game good, and we are not seeing the huge leaps in graphics we used to.
Valve on the other hand...well they haven't made a many mistakes, they built a complete distribution system that is the best around by far
Which is really sad, considering how crap Steam is.
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Could this mean that ID is now going to become less OSS/Linux friendly?
Carmack has said before that the Linux port did not make much sense from a business point of view.
[The port to the Wii almost certainly does make sense. The cell phone. The portable media player.]
He has waffled now and then on DX vs OGL.
iD released game engines that were well past their commercial prime.
Never the games themselves.
The IP that makes a Commander Keen or Doom or Wolfenstein a unique and valuable property.
Bethesda's focus is on the sale of its games - and not on the sale of its game engines.
I can't see any very compelling reason for it to open source anything.
Perhaps this is OT, but I think it is likely the primary reason for this deal- What happened to iD's engine licensing? Before D3 it seemed 80% of games were iD based, the rest being Unreal. What happened to make iD's engines so unappealing today?
iD Tech 5 is is supposed to be able to do large outdoor spaces just fine.
I have to agree with this. id has really failed to do anything disruptive in its last few releases, while being a company founded and based almost entirely on its early clout as a disruptive innovator. Steam is a good point of comparison. While it may not have been a stellar product to begin with, and may would argue it still has its flaws, it has created an entirely new business for Valve beyond the process of having to develop AAA title after AAA title. Videogames are like movies; the success and failure of the firms is determined by their ability to produce blockbusters or exploit alternative revenue streams. id managed to shut itself out of the engine market, and producing blockbusters endlessly is simply impossible. I think these conditions together made selling out an inevitable prospect and a favorable alternative to eventually suspending operations.
It seems like the Quake engines are mostly optimized for indoors rendering, and anything in a Bethesda-style RPG would need to be optimized for large outdoor spaces, with trees, times of day/night, weather, etc.
The first Bethesda game I ever played was The Elder Scrolls - Chapter 1: The Arena. "Arena" was built on the iD Wolfenstein 3D game engine, however they did adapt that engine to include all kinds of really cool, ahead-of-its-time features. Reflective puddles, fog and rain effects, outdoors that synced night/dawn/day/dusk skymaps with lighting conditions, perspective rolling when being damaged, a 400+ city world. All this on the Wolf3D engine!!!!
I find it ironic that Bethesda's biggest cumulative game (The Elder Scrolls, pick your chapter) started off with an iD software engine, and now they bought iD.
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I doubt it will be GPLed that soon given that Wolfenstein is just coming out. If it's anything like how Q3 was handled, they're going to wait until some time after the last commercial game is released. Carmack had to wait for nearly a year to release the Q3 source code since someone new had licensed it shortly before he wanted to release it in 2004 (I think it was for the video game tie-in for UPN's abysmal Game Over)
Valve on the other hand...well they haven't made a many mistakes, they built a complete distribution system that is the best around by far
Which is really sad, considering how crap Steam is.
Sorry, what?
Having a copy of all my games online, whenever I need them, is an absolute godsend.
And they were one of the first ones to do it! (online content distribution which actually worked)
They've already said that they would release all the games if they ever went out of business (from DRM).
The application doesn't take up much RAM, each game starts up within seconds, and hell, it has a built in instant messenger too?
It's still possible to crack all their games that they release fairly easily.
They are hardly going out of business.
So what don't you like?
Do you have any more specific information on the talk he gave? Is there an online translation, audio or video version of the talk? OpenGL has certainly not fallen into disuse, in fact it is the standard 3D API for the PS3, Apple OSX and I believe the Nintendo Wii (correction?). And add to that list any non MS operating system. Direct 3D is Microsoft only so you are limited to the Xbox or Windows. Also consider the fact that OpenGL is not only geared toward hardware acceleration but can also be rendered in software if desired. Direct 3D is hardware only.
I am fully aware of the fact that yes hardware rendering is the way to go but with today's multicore and specialized CPU's and GPU's we might find ourselves using software rendering systems running on gp-gpu or super multicore systems. Concider that the Intel laurabee is a bunch of stripped down x86 cpu's, it is nothing more then a cluster of x86's on one die. OpenGL, ray tracing and direct3d drivers will be nothing more than software render engines running on the multitude of laurabee cores with an added raster pipeline. And OpenGL has the advantage of being open source so drivers can be open source or developed to take advantage of certain features. Optimizations can easily be made to the driver and open source 3D drivers can be easily written. Pair that with OpenCL and you are really cooking with gas.
Personally, I've been real unimpressed with iD's engine offerings. When Doom 3 came out I was extremely underwhelmed. It was a great example of something that was maybe more technically correct, but didn't look as good. I felt UT2004 looked better, despite being an older engine. I mean the lighting in Doom 3 was a neat technology, but didn't work well in game. You ended up with extremely dark corners because the shadows were all hard and light bounced only once. Also it required some heavy hitting hardware in relation to how good it looked.
UE3 just totally annihilates it and that is still the engine they are using, with minor updates. The sales numbers back it up too. IdTech 4, which is what Doom 3 uses, has been used in like 8 games, a number of them iD's own. UE3 has been used in like 50 games, and UE2 in like 70.
Epic has really out done iD in the engine area in my opinion.
Yes, I know the company is still there, but is the team really still relevant? The company that's there now just doesn't seem to have much in common the id we always knew and loved, largely because of talent drain.
id lost a lot of it's best people years ago, Carmack is still there but hardly any of the greats from the Wolf/Doom/Quake days are still there. Romero? McGee? Petersen? Carmack (Adrian)? Steed?
It seems they lost their key people in various areas, sure people like Romero became laughing stocks when they left because the guy clearly wasn't a CEO when it came to, that doesn't mean of course he wasn't a great designer and developer when working at id. McGee and Petersen - almost certainly their greatest level builders. Steed, their best 3D artist. Even people like David Kirsch who did the Quakeworld netcode that is still the foundation of the netcode in many modern FPS such as HL2.
Carmack was always id's best programmer when it came to visualisation, but the loss of other key characters seems to sum up what id Software has become - a developer of games that are graphically impressive, but hollow beyond that. With the rise of the newer versions of the Unreal engine and developers like Crytek even Carmack's prowess in the graphics world seems to be lagging a bit.
It's sad in a way, I'll always respect id for what they were, but I think the loss of so many key figures was a big deal. I don't mean to detract from the staff working there now, id still has some brilliant people but I think what id doesn't have anymore is a dream team which I think it did have back in the old Wolf/Doom/Quake days.
I'd love to see that team reunite for one more game but that's little more than a dream.
That is problematic since it means multiple code paths for different cards
As opposed to DirectX where you have capability bits and have to test whether a card supports a given capability, and have multiple code paths for the cases where it doesn't? Or with DirectX 10 where you have a feature set equivalent to OpenGL 3 but no support for cards that don't support all of this feature set and no way of supporting features on cards that aren't part of this?
You'll see some OpenGL developers deride GL 3 as "OpenGL 1.6" because it was not the truly new redesign promised, but rather some stuff hacked on the old GL
And, mostly, these developers are idiots. There is a subset of OpenGL 3 which is forward-compatible. This is a very modern API. There is a subset of OpenGL 3 which is backwards compatible. This is a legacy API and is deprecated (i.e. all of the fixed-function pipeline stuff, and a load of other things). OpenGL 3.1 dropped it entirely. If you want a modern API, just use the forward-compatible subset, or use OpenGL 3.1 (more or less the same). Or would you prefer the DirectX model where each release comes with a completely new API?
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Where to begin. The UI sucks, with unreadable text in many places. It constantly tells me my video card drivers are out of date when they aren't. Ditto with DirectX versions (it's upgraded my DirectX three times this week alone!) Half the time when you start it up, it just shows a blank white screen and you have to close and restart it to see your games list. The pricing in the store is frequently wrong, and they don't respond to tickets when you ask to buy a product at it's advertised price. In fact, support is non-existant. There is no quality control for games, meaning they'll gladly list games that are ridiculously broken (like Americas Army 3.) There is no auto-installer for mods that I've discovered- you just have to copy the files manually.
Valve gets away with all this because PC gamers generally assign very little value to software quality. Although I don't get wh nobody calls them out on the lack of customer service. I've seen a lot more bugs then the ones listed, BTW.
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