With QuakeCon 2010 underway, id Software has been promoting new technology and games. Though fans of the studio did not get a Quake 4 announcement, they did get to see the new Rage for iPhone game, demoed by id’s John Carmack.
The new mobile game was demoed for the first time at QuakeCon 2010 during Carmack’s keynote speech. The game highlighted the new engine and what it is able to do, even on handhelds. Developers anxious to get their hands on the software are in for a bit of a hurdle though, as id Software boss Todd Hollenshead stated to Eurogamer that the engine is not up for licensing.
"It's going to be used within ZeniMax, so we're not going to license it to external parties," Hollenshead said. "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."
In fact, licensing was never really an issue for id. Whereas studios like Crytek and Epic license their in-studio engines out to other groups, id wants to focus on their engine for the purpose it was built - to build new games.
"I think that [Epic] made a strategic choice to focus on the middleware service stuff, and we never pretended to be focused on technology licensing," he said. "It was that we made the technology for our games, and the philosophy was that...the technology was wasted if you're just using it on one game, so we wanted to be able to license it out to a small number of developers. Epic's made a good business out of that so kudos to them, but I wouldn't change the way we've done things."
2 Comments
August 15, 2010
It doesn't matter in a PC multiplayer havy point of view. Every studio that cares has it's own engine or access to idTech. Too bad Brink is still idTech4.
August 17, 2010
idtech5 seems very impressive, be nice if other developers had access to it to make better games in general. But its a business.