Topic: id Software Acquired by Bethesda Owner ZeniMax

[idolminds]

WHAT THE FUCK?

I...wha.....buh......snuh?

[K-man]

Eh.  Little if anything will change.  id.'s a cash cow and they won't do anything to upset that.

[sirean_syan]

If nothing really changes at id, that's well enough.

However, this could finally be awesome news for Besthesda's game engines. Imagine Carmack putting some time into the next Elder Scrolls/Fallout/whatever engine. That could be amazing.

[Pugnate]

I imagine this will change hardly anything.

[idolminds]

After the initial shock, it seems like this is similar to the Blizzard/Activision merger...without the merging. Blizzard is still Blizzard, and id will still be id.

I am happy their future games will not be published by EA...except RAGE since they already signed that one away. Fuck.

John Romero's twitter is funny.

[MysterD]

If nothing really changes at ID, that's well enough.

However, this could finally be awesome news for Besthesda's game engines. Imagine Carmack putting some time into the next Elder Scrolls/Fallout/whatever engine. That could be amazing.

Agreed at this 100%.

[Cobra951]

Is nothing sacred?   

"ZeniMax".  Sounds like a fake impotence drug.

[MysterD]

Is nothing sacred?   

"ZeniMax".  Sounds like a fake impotence drug.

Well, this even more so explains why BethSoft, Zenimax, and Splash got together for the upcoming game BRINK...

[Xessive]

Cool. I'm curious to see the possibilities.

[scottws]

I wonder if this is a precursor to an exit by John Carmack.  He's been saying for awhile now he wants to move on from programming 3D engines.

[Quemaqua]

Interesting news.  I don't really see it as a bad thing, as ZeniMax has long been very good about keeping away from corporate mandates and stuff.  They're really almost entirely invisible where the operations of their studios are concerned.  And yeah, I think it's a much better thing than dealing with EA and their ilk.

It does make you wonder about what scott said, though.  I also wonder how the deal went down and what kind of money was exchanged.

[MysterD]

I really hope Carmack isn't done.
He's probably the best to ever do it, when it comes to making game engines.

[idolminds]

Carmack speaks

He says they are going to build up a 3rd major internal dev team. Sounds like they are taking the Quake Live guys, giving them id Tech 5 experience by putting them on the Rage and Doom 4 projects, and then setting them loose on one of the other id IPs. Since we've already got a new Doom and Wolfenstein coming, will they be doing a new Quake? Commander Keen? A super epic HD Doom RPG or Orcs & Elves? Man, I'd love that.

Anyway:

ZeniMax came with an offer. The more we looked at it, the more we liked it. The two obvious choices [of id buyers] were Electronic Arts and Activision. They're the two giants of the industry. But we knew that we would have to go through big corporate changes if we went with them. We know the developers at the studios owned by those companies. And while they have good things to say, there is no doubt about it that things would change at a company of that scale. If we had gone to one of those companies, we would be one more studio. We would be a prized studio. But we wouldn't even be their only shooter studio. We would be competing for resources with our brother and sister studios. There is no question if they have Call of Duty project, there would be some degree of conflict there.

With ZeniMax, they have a lot to be proud of. Fallout 3 is one of the favorite games of so many of our people. But they had zero overlap with the things we do. We do the best shooters in the world. It's a perfect hand and glove fit. We started talking about this before they rolled out Fallout 3. We watch them roll it out worldwide. They really did what they said they could do. That was a important in how we looked at this. They resurrected an old title and really made something big out of it. We could be a sister company with Bethesda, where we had a lot of mutual respect and admiration. That was about as good as it could get. And we could do our games the same way we have been. The corporate cultures are compatible. And when we go out to publish the games, now we will be doing that. We can become a publisher through ZeniMax.

[MysterD]

Id Tech 5 will ONLY be for titles that are published by Zenimax / Bethesda.

Also, Zenimax acquires Arkane Studios.
Arkane were the makers of Arx Fatalis, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, the postponed game The Crossing.
They also helped out to do some work on Bioshock 2, BTW.

[idolminds]

"It's going to be used within ZeniMax, so we're not going to license it to external parties," Hollenshead told Eurogamer at QuakeCon 2010 in Dallas today.

"It's like, look, this is a competitive advantage and we want to keep it within games we publish - not necessarily exclusively to id or id titles, but if you're going to make a game with id Tech 5 then it needs to be published by Bethesda, which I think is a fair thing."

Hollenshead said he could imagine the technology being used by third-party developers, but only if their games were published by Bethesda, under which circumstances id would withhold nothing.

It makes some sense, but I think it will limit how many people use the engine. Which sucks, because it looks very capable. Lots of IP is owned by publishers and not devs. So you won't see a Call of Duty game with this engine. You won't see...oh, Mirrors Edge 2 use it.

On the plus side, Elder Scrolls on id Tech 5 is looking likely.

[W7RE]

Probably a push to get more Publishing deals for Bethesda, and less of a "this is ours" type thing.

[MysterD]

BethBlog -> Zenimax does some more shopping, picking up now Tango Studios.
Shinji Mikami is the leader of that Tango Studios.
He created Res Evil series worked on all RE games up until finishing RE4.

[MysterD]

Shacknews -> Zenimax buys another company - MachineGames.
MachineGames consists of many ex-Starbreeze dev's that worked on Riddick: Butcher Bay and The Darkness.