id Software maintains 'games first, licenses second' approach with idTech 5

Because there is acid in the air. Luckily, though, they've evolved so that their nipples are as hard as rock, and so immune to it.

John Carmack is to Tim Sweeney as Mark Rein is to Todd Hollenshead.

Raven is making the newest Wolfenstein. Id just helps them out and licenses the engine. Rage and Doom 4 are Id's primary IPs currently.

Epic's veteran members cry every time someone cites Gears of War as the source of their success instead of Unreal Tournament.

their approach sounds right to me, let build a game out of it, them we will see if it is good to be licensed, this way you know you are selling a proved engine

Agreed but Doom 3 on max settings today on a top of the line machine looks better than most shooters out there for the PC and its like 6 years old or more. So it may have been a chore to get through, but thats a gameplay/game designer issue. The engine itself still performs well and when put to the max, produced beautiful graphics.

iD knows their engines, period. The doom engines, quake engines and most iD tech engines have always been a cut head of the competitors when they launched and for a little while afterwards pretty much. They also have proven reasoanble versatile too like the Star Trek Voyager: Elite Forces game made from the Q3 engine. That game is still sweet and we need more like it! The recreationg of Voyager by RavenStudios was so realistic and detailed that it is almost uncanny.

Most other shooters have not been so kind with that kind of age like Metal of Honor: Rising Sun for example looks like crap after 6 years compared to modern shooters. MoH:RS happned to have crappy gameplay and a crappy engine. I think that's why you can find it in a bargin bin for $4.99 with a big red clearance sticker on it.

http://www.methodonline.com/temp/meth_test.htm

Look at those screenshots and tell me that id don't make good engines.

Besides, didn't Carmack practically pioneer the normal mapping technique used by every single modern 3d engine that allows geometry to look very like million polycounts when it is only thousands?

If they don't talk about it now, by the time something is publicly playable no one would know about it.

@Nought

No, I don't think so. He came up with several innovative solutions for various aspects of computer graphics, but normal mapping wasn't one of them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_carmack

another point that often gets overlooked is they've always supported OpenGL approach which has often rivaled or surpassed the proprietary DirectX.

this is how they're able to support all the different platforms with up to 90% of the same code.