How come Valve and Epic, once id copycats, ended up becoming multibillion industry titans while id themselves sold out to the big corpos?
How come Valve and Epic, once id copycats, ended up becoming multibillion industry titans while id themselves sold out to the big corpos?
I don't know, but I think we should blame Daikatana
>daikatana
>I'd
?
>Epic
Gains success from Unreal games but then puts their money into creating game engines that push the graphical envelope and gradually makes less and less games until they hit BIG with Fortnite which they've been milking for 8 years now
>Valve
Make successful games and then create Steam which revitalized the PC gaming market and is now the best storefront after competitors failed
>Id soft
Couldn't replicate the stellar success from Quake, Doom and wolf3d, Daikatana happens and it implodes the company to split further than they already were on top of releasing mediocrity (doom 3, quake 4, rage), Quake 3 arena gradually becomes more and more niche as the interest in FPS games shifted to be less arena oriented and they never really benefited from the modding scene from either doom or quake (if anything the opposite happened considering Valve's first games might as well be quake mods).
By the time id soft made a good and successful game again [Doom 4 and then Eternal], all of the old staff was long gone and this was also after Bethesda got them
Daikatana was Ion Storm. Not id.
to be exact the dallas branch of ion storm, which cofounded by john romero after he was fired by carmack.
meanwhile warren spector, ion storm austin branch created deus ex
>Daikatana happens and it implodes the company to split further
Least moronic Steam user.
id was held by carmack's lack of ambition
he was butthurt because romero was 'trying to build an empire'
romero was handed ion storm on a silver platter but was held back by his idealism
adrian, tom and the rest were just along for the ride
and if you can believe sandy it was a company of young drama queens
romero leaving meant carmack would just program shaders 24/7 and no one forced him to make fun games
Romero and Carmack go hand in hand to make good games but unfortunately they were both big players in their respective niche which made it hard.
Also doesn't help that Romero just wanted to play games, which was good... except with Quake's development spending it on Doom Deathmatch.
>except with Quake's development spending it on Doom Deathmatch.
quake deathmatch is peak though so it was time well spent
From the left
John Carmack
?
?
John Romero
Tom Hall?
?
Far right: Jay Wilbur
two guys next to Carmack: Tim Willits and American McGee
>American McGee
holy shit it's his actual name
>holy shit it's his actual name
Read his life story sometime, it's pretty fricked up.
its depressing to see them so old now, aging sucks
>its depressing to see them so old now, aging sucks
I was at a small industry get together a while back and for whatever reason peter molyneux was there and it was fricking rough seeing him like that, the c**t was depressed as hell, old, forgetful, really struggling in conversation and you could see it on his face that he knew he was polarizing, people either wanted to suck his wiener or toss him from a balcony but I think he just wanted to be a fly on the wall, to just be there, talk game development and just be a nobody that no one knew instead of a nobody everyone knows.
>and just be a nobody that no one knew instead of a nobody everyone knows.
Brutal.
Sorry to hear that and hope you're just bullshitting 'cause as pissed as Molyneux made me starting with Black and White (Absolutely gutted me since I was more excited for that than anything and then started playing and realized most of what was said by game journos and previews was completely false) he obviously did/does have a passion for games and I wouldn't really want him to get fricking dementia or something
Carmack's business model was usually to release a new game when he had new tech to display. As the tech breakthroughs took longer, the gaps between releaser grew wider, and to make matters worse, the games weren't that good when they finally came out. I like Doom 3 but Half Life 2 overshadowed it both as a tech demo and as a game. RAGE was okay, just okay.
>I like Doom 3 but Half Life 2 overshadowed it both as a tech demo and as a game
It's crazy how Doom 3 got BTFO by HL2 so hard that they quickly added their own gravity gun knockoff in the DLC.
Id lost its good game developers over time and was left with carmack in charge who is a great at developing game engines but is not very good at making games for them. They honestly should have focused on making game engines for others to use like epic did after they started losing all their good game designers.
Sweeney knew he was a turbo autist programmer, and thus surrounded himself with good artists, designers and managers who he listened to.
Gabe knew he was an ex-microsoft corporate hack and thus surrounded himself with good programmers, artists, designers with whom he'd form a microsoft-esque monopoly.
Romero and Carmack both sucked the oxygen out of any room they were in, butted heads on everything, are total polar opposites and neither had anyone to reign them in, the lack of good leadership meant what little talent they had attracted scattered.
>Romero and Carmack both sucked the oxygen out of any room they were in, butted heads on everything, are total polar opposites and neither had anyone to reign them in, the lack of good leadership meant what little talent they had attracted scattered.
Yeah, what happened was that Carmack and Romero were autistic douchebags and needed a tard wrangler to keep them productive, that was Softdisk and later Apogee. Notice that when id Software started to "self govern" around the time of Doom II, that was when the decline started.
So who was ultimately in the wrong?
When people talk about the fall of id they always talk about the big names, but those weren't the people that allegedly screwed up the company
they all were - they got greedy after wolf3d's success and thought they can do anything
and after the success of doom the problems developing quake caught them with their pants down
and from then on just kept making bad decisions: pushing out key talent like tom, firing key talent (mcgee), letting backstabbers like willits reign supreme etc.
Hearing all the story's about Carmack being an butthole but also the kind of butthole who admit his errors and Romero being a more charming kind of butthole, probably both in their own way
Carmack.
>abandoned a cat to certain doom
>screwed over Tom
>tried to screw over Romero by changing code constantly
Romero was more of the rock star wannabe and acted the part, while Carmack just came off as a misanthropic sperg
because id software had a shitty web 1.0 website and a retail/mail order business model well into the 00's, while Valve made the iTunes of vidya.
Epic because of Unreal Engine, and they lucked out with revamping Fortnite from a PvE base defense game into a Battle Royale game, making them a shit ton of money.
Valve because they forced people onto Steam with their games early on, then abandoned games to focus exclusively on Steam.
It's why a lot of older gamers either are neutral or hate Valve, while younger gamers seem to love Valve and are full on-board with "Steam" culture.
Wasn't the quake 3 engine in a bunch of things?
Maybe Id people were more like of game developers than businessmen themselves.