iGame Radio

Reported by numerous sources yesterday, including Shacknews, id Software has been acquired by Bethesda owner ZeniMax. The details of the acquisition have not been disclosed, but ZeniMax has stated that id Software will continue to operate as a studio under the direction of John Carmack. All the principals at id Software have signed long-term employment contracts as well. Bethesda will publish all future id Software games, except for the upcoming releases that are already committed to other publishers, such as RAGE.

In an interview with Kotaku, John Carmack and Todd Hollenshead discussed the changing circumstances with Activision and other studios that caused them to make this deal. Carmack stated that many publishers didn’t like id Software working with partner companies in the development cycle. They wanted to see the development work done internally. “That’s why we already started to staff up to do Doom 4 internally,” Carmack said. “So things were already moving in that direction.”

One question that hasn’t been addressed yet is who would own the id Software IP. Do principles within id Software still own it, or does ZeniMax? A purchase of the company like this points to the latter. If so, let us hope that there are no issues with the relationship between them. We would not want to see a repeat of the issues that happened between Microsoft and Bungie with the Halo IP.