John Carmack makes sense of the ZeniMax acquisition.
GameSpot’s Tor Thorsen interviewed Id Software’s Chief Technology Officer John Carmack recently in the wake of ZeniMax Software’s buyout of Id, revealing key reasons for the landmark business decision.
Id, one of the biggest independent developers in the industry, has long had a firm publishing relationship with Activision, now the largest independent publisher in the world thanks to its merger with Vivendi, which made this acquisition a surprise to many.
As the video game industry’s landscape has changed drastically since Id’s humble share-ware origins, that relationship has made some sort of sense, with Id keeping control over its IP, and Activision serving as a publishing arm.
“But since the very beginning, even before [the first] Wolfenstein was published, id has gotten a lot of offers to be acquired by various companies, and there were always pros and cons to it,” Carmack told GameSpot. “It’s always nice when somebody offers you a lot of money, but then again, you have to trade it for the idea that you wouldn’t completely be your own boss. You may have to do something you wouldn’t do in a different company, and that becomes a statement about their corporate culture.”
From my perspective, Id’s remained fiercely independent, making any Activision acquisition a difficult one to strategically make sense of. While the Santa Monica-based publisher has smartly avoided EA’s Borg-style of acquisition–buying the developer for the intellectual property and gutting the creative forces and key designers–when Activision does buy a developer, that team must then do Activision’s bidding, whatever that may be.
Trey Arch is a key example of this strategy, being directed to whatever is the most important title at the moment, with little time to complete the project, and usually with a big licensed attached to it. A worst-cased scenario of this strategy is the former Dave Mirra BMX developer Z-Axis, which Activision bought and then had little luck with on at least one never-published game and X-Men: The Official Game, which was panned.
It has watched Activision-owned Infinity Ward rocket in popularity due to its Call of Duty and Modern Warfare series, eclipsing the aging Doom and Quake series. While in the technological side of things, Epic Games’ Unreal engine has become the industry standard for tech engines in this console generation, eclipsing Id’s technology as the preferred tech engine.
“I mean, we had to wonder how we would be if we were acquired by Sierra, Activision, EA or any of the potential publishers there. The other aspect you have to look at with the larger publishers is that there’s almost always some competitive interest. Activision and EA already have developers that do first-person shooters. If we were to come into the fold on one of those, then we would be competing against the brother and sister companies under that umbrella. We’d be fighting for attention for the marketing department to get positioned.”
Carmack answers the strategic fit question later in the interview, giving context to the ways in which Id’s corporate culture would fit or mesh with ZeniMax’s corporate culture, and answering Id’s tendency to publish a game only “when it’s done.”
“Yeah, there’s a couple aspects to that. In terms of the “when it’s done” thing, another key advantage about ZeniMax is that it’s a private company. They do not have quarterly reports that have to go out, and they don’t have to worry about making their publicly stated targets. I mean, our contracts with Activision and EA always said that we didn’t have to push out anything out over our objections. We were never in a position where something would get pushed out. But that doesn’t mean that there is not some level of…well, let’s just say, they convey their desires to us.”
GameInsano.com 