Despite New Owner, id Still Lives Or Dies By Their Engines

The Guardian has an article about id Software's status after being purchased by ZeniMax (Bethesda's parent company) not long ago. While id gained considerable financial stability out of the deal, it's clear that what Bethesda has to gain is access to top-of-the-line engine technology, which they've often needed to license. id's Todd Hollenshead said, "The videogames business is defined by technology, which is why guys like JC [John Carmack] are still so significant. Consumers may not be as in touch with the intricacies as they used to be, but you can still make significant, impactful change. We're confident Rage will be one of them..." He also mentions that "the PC market has receded in terms of significance," a sentiment evidenced by id's aggressive expansion into the iPhone games market.

Comments

Thanks id Software, for the GPL of Doom/Quake

[G3ckoG33k]

Thanks id Software, for the GPL of Doom/Quake. Right now it is a serious blessing! Thanks!

Try making good games again id...

[dstyle5]

"the PC market has receded in terms of significance,"

While its true that PC gaming is sharing a larger and larger chunk of its gaming dollars with consoles, there is still money to be made on PCs IMO. For people like me I'll take mouse/keyboard over a console controller any day for FPS games. Perhaps id would make more money if their more recent PC games were actually good. Given their new found financial resources I hope id takes the time and creates something other than Doom X with shiny id Tech Y. Try adding some new, innovative game play in your next game and perhaps I might buy it.

Re:Reduced Focus = Reduced Significance

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't get how you think id and Valve have forgotten the platform that made them big. Pretty much all of id's work lands on PC first, and Steam is a distribution platform for PC games.

Re:Reduced Focus = Reduced Significance

[icebraining]

"Any advantage the mouse/keyboard combo gave the PC (which was substantial) is shrinking; it nearly went away with the wiimote. "

Wait, why? These are completely unrelated, and the game types are completely different. How do you play a FPS or a RTS (which account for most of the PC games) using a Wiimote?

Re:atleast EA didn't buy them

[AuMatar]

HE owned a big part of Id, but unless it's in the buyout contract I wouldn't be so certain it will happen. Management can change it's mind at any time. It probably won't for the next engine to be opened, because they want to keep Carmack happy. But I'd be surprised (pleasantly so) if it actually continues long term.

Re:Reduced Focus = Reduced Significance

[alexhard]

The keyboard and mouse combo is still very far from being surpassed. The problem is that 99% of games these days are cross-platform, and as such the control scheme is designed for the lowest common denominator (consoles), and thus doesn't make use of the possibilities offered by keyboard+mouse.

Another advantage the PC has is much more powerful hardware.

Re:The times they are changing...

[JCZwart]

I always thought Id's games were perfect examples of engine showcases. I remember being very fascinated with Quake; read all about it, BSP modeling etc. (I even tried to create my own 3d-engine, which failed miserable, by the way).

Anyone else remember Ramblings in Real-time by Mike Abrash? Worth a read if you're interested in the mechanics of the Quake 3D-engine.

But Quake still wasn't very much more than showcasing... Id often seemed to rely on parties such as Raven Software for convincing storylines, exciting level designs, etc. I'd like to see them produce a game like Oblivion... A cutting edge 3d engine to power a convincing RPG world, what more would you want!

I also wonder how true that really is

[Sycraft-fu]

It would seem from a number of ways of looking at it, that the PC is as large a market as any given console. It is the "4th console" as it were. As such that means the market is not at all insignificant. Part of the problem I think is that some publishers view it as "PC vs Console" where all consoles are unified in to one market, and the PC in a separate one. They then think that the PC market should be as big as the console market and bemoan that it isn't. That's just not a good way to look at it.

Also some developers at least are showing a renewed interest in the PC. Capcom, for example, decided to bring Street Fighter 4 to the PC. It comes out next Tuesday. They had done some of the SF games on PC, but stopped after Alpha 2. However now they are trying again. Part of it may be because the Arcade version of the game is a Windows PC (it runs on Taito X2 hardware which is an XP embedded PC) but they also must see the PC market as worth the port, as they've already one Xbox 360 and PS3 ports.

I do think you are on to something with the quality of iD's games. I have been very unimpressed. Quake 4 in particular was a real disappointment. However not only have their games disappointed me, but their engine has as well. That was traditionally their big thing. Their engine was the cutting edge.

Well when Doom 3 came out, showing off iDTech 4, I was real underwhelmed. The "all real world light sources" were neat, but poorly done. Shadows were very dark and very harsh, owing to the fact light only bounced once in the engine. What's more, texture detail was substantially below what I was used to. Personally, I felt UT2004 (Unreal Engine 2) looked better over all. Not as many advanced features, but the graphics were more pleasing. Also Doom needed a beast of a system to do what it did, whereas UT2004 ran very well on moderate hardware.

Also iDtech 4 hasn't advanced much at this point. It is still their top flight engine and Unreal Engine 3 totally blows it away. Thus far, they've had no good response.

You can see it in the sales too. Currently there's 7 games that use iDTech 4, and over half of those are iD or Raven (who works closely with iD) games. UE3, which has been out for much less time, has near 100 games using it, including non-FPS games (such as the Last Remnant, an RPG).

It seems like iD isn't making first flight engines, which would be ok if their games were great, but their games are also rather undifferentiated. That is not a good situation to be in. A mediocre game with amazing graphics can still sell well, and of course the engine can be licensed out for all kinds of stuff (maybe the game is just a tech demo more than anything). Likewise a great game can get by just fine with mediocre graphics. However being not so god at both isn't a real recipe for success, especially not if you are spending the money developing your own engine.

We'll see what happens. I hope iD Tech 5 is awesome, but I worry. There really hasn't been anything out of them in terms of news or demos or the like since 2007. That is not a good sign to me. A lot changes in computers in 3 years, you'd think we'd see at least some more news about the status or demos or something. Any time a project is announced and then falls silent for a number of years, I worry that there are problems and it isn't going to be what it should.

Re:I also wonder how true that really is

[Rockoon]

I think one of the main reasons that the Unreal engine really took off is that it comes with UnrealEd.

With ID's engine, you were shopping around for some 3rd party editor and then importing the data, while with Unreal you STILL had the option of importing from 3rd party editors and could do some final tweaking (or working from scratch) while running under the very engine you are targeting in realtime.

technology? what about fun?

[cliffski]

"The videogames business is defined by technology"

Really? I've only been playing games since pong, and worked in them for 10 years, but stupidly I've been defining the videogames business by 'fun'.
It's a pity this has ended up a minority viewpoint.

Re:Curious

[Bert64]

Releasing the source works out extremely beneficial for them... By the time a game gets opened up, it has very little value as a commercial game anymore, but look at any modern platform that has been cracked or released open - a port of quake or doom is one of the first things to spring up. So something that has virtually no commercial value now becomes a free advertising platform and keeps your name prominent.
Most games from the same era as quake are languishing as abandonware and occasionally being played under dosbox, quake runs natively on virtually anything these days.
It's also only the engine that's open, the data files are not, so you can either use third party data files (like urban terror and openarena), the original demo files or buy the original data files (you will usually be able to find a dirt cheap copy of the game in a bargain bin somewhere).

I think all game companies should do this, having the source to old games is good for everyone involved and far better than games becoming abandonware that won't even run on modern systems without some form of emulation.

Re:Reduced Focus = Reduced Significance

[blahplusplus]

"There's a lot of factors. Piracy -> DRM -> problems -> Piracy."

This is a scapegoat I'm sorry, many games were released during the age of broadband and the internet and were easily downloadable then (pre 2000, 1998/1997). Warez scene has been around since ye old shareware days and before that. Copies of Dos / Win 3.1 were shared rampantly via sneakernet.

What really happened is this:

Game graphics tech got more and more complex with the advent of 3D acelleration, which upped development costs for creating assets by an enormous amount. The game industry did this to themselves, their belief that in order to expand the market they had to keep pushing the graphics envelope, etc, etc. From a business standpoint they pushed their development costs higher and higher but the gaming market for each game could not grow in tandem with their development costs.

The advent of 3D acelleration was a blessing but also a major burden for PC game development. The original games (duke 3d, Doom, Doom 2, diablo, starcraft, etc) were *ALL* games that could be rendered by a traditional 2D graphics card. This changed with the advent of 3D accelerators, the like of nvidia and 3dfx so a "Race to the death" in terms of PC graphics performance, new cards every year and then every 6-8 months from nvidia really did a lot to fragment and skew the PC game market for people that didn't even know what a 3D card was.

It took a while until every system had 3D acceleration like today, but even today your onboard 3D acceleration still sucks ass and it's better to go with an add in card.

Descent 3 and Freespace 1 + 2, part of the reason they bombed was because a large segment of Descent and other game players did not have 3D acceleration or could not afford it. This was lost on a lot of PC game developers and they ended up folding or going consoles (volition of freespace and freespace 2 fame comes to mind).

Re:Reduced Focus = Reduced Significance

[Razalhague]

Keyboard shortcuts are an integral part of most RTSes. It's a ridiculous amount of work doing everything on the mouse.

Re:Reduced Focus = Reduced Significance

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

How do you play a FPS or a RTS (which account for most of the PC games) using a Wiimote?

Same way you play them with a mouse. Tense up, breath heavily, make swift twitching movements and press the left click/fire button eight times for every needed press. Then issue a stream of profanities, whether or not you're winning.

Re:Reduced Focus = Reduced Significance

[RiotingPacifist]

Any advantage the mouse/keyboard combo gave the PC (which was substantial) is shrinking; it nearly went away with the wiimote

WTF are you on? the wiimote sucks for anything other than sports/minigames,
MMORPG - forget having a complex worlds with different spells at your fingertips with just a few buttons
RTS - seriously no chance of playing anything but a simplified RTS with just a few buttons
FPS - you need an aimable area much bigger than that of a tv screen
shooters - timecrises/zombie flick/etc well these kind of work, but you never actually point to shoot, you move the crosshair about (but fundamentaly these DO work on the wii)

The other advantages of PC games are ofc:
easy mods :- counter-strike, day of defeat, gary's mod
better graphics - The id5tech engine will have to trade off fps for graphics quality on rage, on pc you get to set this yourself because high-end pcs can already
better bang for buck for hardware - Ok some specs are better on game systems when they are first released, but given that pcs can be upgraded and generally come with more than 512MB ram, if you spend $400 upgrading you system every 3/4 years (probably more often if you bought an xbox) you system would be far more powerful than any current gen system.
Free(ish) multiplayer gaming for most genres.
Better communities / multiplayer architecture for most genres - having dedicated servers, forums and admins, produces a much better gaming experience than xbox/wii/ps3-live ever can

All consoles really have is:
noob friendly (is that really a plus)
local multiplayer