There Is No Plan - id Software employee: "We keep thinking morale can't sink lower but the obvious incompetence of Xbox management somehow keeps driving it down worse."

I wish Carnack would emerge from the void and offer to buy back his first child. id Software and idTech could be so well repositioned to take a cut out of Epic’s pie. Unreal performance is utterly abysmal these days. If only idTech had similar licensing to Unreal…

I think it’s pretty clear that the money people in entertainment – be it video games, movies, TV shows, or even printed paper books – really want properties that they can own (monopolize) and build low-risk, profitable releases on. It’s sort of the logical endpoint of applying capitalism to arts and entertainment.

We expect the game studio to be like a factory, a productive arrangement which the owners are incentivized to maintain and keep operating smoothly. Just as a factory builds a product, we say, a studio builds a game or a movie or whatever.

But the owners see the franchise itself – “Fallout” or “Halo” or “Avengers” or “Star Wars” – as the factory, the thing that’s worth owning, the thing to keep churning. Just as a factory builds a product, they figure, a franchise builds a reliable, low-risk profit.