No, seriously. It sounds like id is basically making a move to become a publisher here, in order to more closely control the IPs that they license. I would've expected it to happen with Activision or maybe EA, but I suspect Zenimax is a lot smaller -- and healthier -- and will allow them to exert much more control. (And I suppose it helps that the two don't develop games that will compete directly.) By the way, id Software was one of the big remaining indie studios. That's another one down.

Certainly wasn't expecting that when I got up this morning, although by the looks of the article nothing much is going to change.

I'm not really sure you could call this "another one down". id has gotten too big for its own britches over the years (not really a bad thing), so they needed to do something to better manage their resources. Seems like a pretty smart move.

Although I have nothing to back this up, the idea of something called "Zenimax Media Group" owning id software gives me bad vibes.

Woot. Maybe they'll share technology.

Quote: Original post by grekster
Certainly wasn't expecting that when I got up this morning, although by the looks of the article nothing much is going to change.

Any time this happens, I get scared. They say not much is going to change, but I think of all the other independent companies who stated the same exact thing only to become a shell of what they once were.

Maybe I'm just completely ignorant of how all of this works, but as big as id is couldn't they just become a publisher? Just like Nintendo and EA did?

Quote: Original post by OrangyTang
Although I have nothing to back this up, the idea of something called "Zenimax Media Group" owning id software gives me bad vibes.

Don't forget that they're also the owners of Bethesda Softworks, and those guys have certainly kept me happy over the years :)

Why hello Gamedev. It's been a while.

Anyway, I see that as a good thing. Has iD been relevent since... Doom 3 ? I mean, their main asset is/was John Carmack, but these days, he seems much more interested in spaceships than video games.

The design of their games has, IMHO, always been lackluster, which wasn't a problem back in the days where they pretty much invented the FPS genre and WERE the market. Now that competition has ramped up, it seems to me like they have lost their edge.

I guess it's hard to find good game programmers in Texas since I was just looking at their job openings the other day and was suprised at how many openings they had!
I also read John Carmack's post on porting Wolfenstein to the iphone and it also sounded that he wasn't too happy about the way EA was doing it and just did it himself so I don't think he's spending all him time building spaceships LOL!
But yeah I hope Carmack is still able to stand up against Zenimax/Bethesda like he did against EA if he doesn't agree with them.