Posted by: Jason Prince
on August 04, 2004 08:29 PM
ID makes an awful lot of money off of <A HREF="http://www.idsoftware.com/business/technology/" title="idsoftware.com">licensing its engines</a idsoftware.com>. The Quake III engine, which is now almost four years old (albeit with RTCW improvements from 2001), still sells for $500K per game plus royalties IIRC.
Most - if not all - of the games based on the Quake III engine made no significant changes at all to the game code. So it is quite possible that third parties could take the code, build their games and statically link their artwork, levels, sounds, and so forth to the GPL'd engine, enabling the actual game data to remain proprietary. ID would lose millions of dollars in revenue because of this.
Even if some companies chose to license the engine commercially, ID would still lose out, because instead of providing merely the engine, they would have to provide additional benefits to justify the cost - namely advanced technical support - thereby reducing their profits still further.
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Posted by: Jason Prince on August 04, 2004 08:29 PMID makes an awful lot of money off of <A HREF="http://www.idsoftware.com/business/technology/" title="idsoftware.com">licensing its engines</a idsoftware.com>. The Quake III engine, which is now almost four years old (albeit with RTCW improvements from 2001), still sells for $500K per game plus royalties IIRC.
Most - if not all - of the games based on the Quake III engine made no significant changes at all to the game code. So it is quite possible that third parties could take the code, build their games and statically link their artwork, levels, sounds, and so forth to the GPL'd engine, enabling the actual game data to remain proprietary. ID would lose millions of dollars in revenue because of this.
Even if some companies chose to license the engine commercially, ID would still lose out, because instead of providing merely the engine, they would have to provide additional benefits to justify the cost - namely advanced technical support - thereby reducing their profits still further.
This is the reality - it is NOT going to happen.
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