id Software Acquired by Bethesda Owner ZeniMax

Talk about pissing your money down the drain. Is Id even remotely relevant in gaming these days? The staff themselves seemed to lose interest in games development long ago and as a result every aspect of their business is breaking down.

Id used to be the dominant force in online gaming but they chose to abandon the deathmatch community and did pretty much nothing deathmatch related for ten years. With nothing new to keep people interested players went elsewhere and found different games to play. With all the players gone Id’s online games can’t even attract a few hundred regular players while games like COD and Halo attract millions. They used to own the online deathmach market but they threw it away through arrogance and contempt for their customer and now they’re a completely irrelevant company when it comes to online gaming.

Id used to be the dominant force in engine licensing but Carmack’s interests now lie elsewhere with him seemingly spending a considerable portion of his time on cell phone games and Armadillo Aerospace. A more motivated Tim Sweeny has made Epic the big player in engine licensing and based on recent articles it seems Id isn’t having much success licensing IdTech5 to other developers. Once again, Id has faded into irrelevance in an area where they used to be a major powerhouse.

Id used to be the dominant force when it game to innovative games, creating the whole first person shooter genre with Wolfenstein and introducing the online deathmatch with Doom. Quake introduced true 3D environments which added a huge amount of depth to the single and multiplayer experience. Seeing the rapid rise in online gaming they released the online only Quake 3 far before internet gaming had become truly mainstream. They were always pushing the limits of innovation but things went terribly wrong with Doom 3 which took years to make and then turned out to be the most generic and repetitive game I’ve ever played from start to finish. Walk down corridor, Imp jumps out and slashes you across the face, walk down another corridor, Imps come out of a cupboard and attack you from behind, wash, rinse repeat. Doom 3 was the first Id game to thoroughly disappoint and felt incredibly stale. Games like COD4 and Left 4 Dead have continued to innovate in the first person genre bringing new and exciting gameplay while Id have been reduced to producing generic crap that is no longer exciting people. They hit a new low with Quake Live when they took a ten year old game that many of use have played to death and stuck it in a browser. They’ve stopped innovating and now they’re going backwards. In terms of introducing revolutionary new gameplay Id have faded into irrelevance.

It seems the owners of Id just aren’t that interested in games anymore. Their lack of interested has shown in their products for the last ten years and now their interest has reached such a low that they’ve sold the company and are presumably planning to make an exit in the near future.

What happens from now on to the carcass of Id aftheir their enthusiasm died ten years ago and has been rotting since? They’ve been living on their former glory alone for a decade, selling games purely based on their past reputation. Their recent games have been thoroughly disappointing and a lot of their fans have lost faith in them. If Rage disappoints they will lose whatever fans they still have left and their ability to sell games in large volumes along with them. At that point they company is dead which is why buying Id seems to me like a terrible waste of money to me. This will be especially the came if Carmack does leave because his programming genius is about the only thing Id has going for it right now.