/vr/ - Retro Games

[Anonymous No.7990604]

How much did they make from Doom and Quake? How have Romero and McGee been able to do like jack shit (other than the 2 alice games) since being fired and still pretty wealthy? How is Carmack so rich he can shoot off rockets for fun?

[Anonymous No.7990612]

>>7990604
In an interview, American said he started at like 30k a year and made his way up over the years to 500k. Romero and Carmack were founders so they were part of id longer than most employees so I'm guessing in the mid 90s they made 500k to a million yearly at the very least or even more since Doom was so successful with a handful of people credited. A pro athlete salary

[Anonymous No.7990631]

Here's some information from when Adrian Carmack sued id.
>He was a 41%-owner of id until he left the company in 2005. At the time the press was told he felt he had done all he could do in the gaming field and was planning to pursue his passions of art. However, in September 2005, The Wall Street Journal revealed he was taking his former business partners to court, claiming he was effectively fired by them in an attempt to force him to sell his 41% stake in the company for $11 million under the terms of a contract he wants the court to nullify. $11 million is thought to be a fraction of the true value of his stake, which is thought to be closer to $43 million after the company received a $105 million bid from Activision in 2004.
It should be noted that Zenimax paid $150 million for id in 2009 and Carmack claimed Zenimax still owed him $22 million from that deal.
I have to imagine made some kind of financial investment into Oculus when he got involved with it. That would have netted him a shit ton of money during the buyout by Facebook.
Assuming Romero held onto stake in id, he's probably sitting on multi-millions.

[Anonymous No.7990632]

>>7990604
>How much did they make from Doom and Quake?
a million-bajillion smackaroos

[Anonymous No.7990787]

>>7990604
What are you talking about, Romero is stuck working at a gas station

[Anonymous No.7991204]

>>7990787
He made a bunch of money on some dumb java game at the height of Facebook games like farmville

[Anonymous No.7991206]

How did they get away with making a whole soundtrack just from stolen Pantera songs?

[Anonymous No.7991217]

>>7990604
id makes most of their money from licensing their engines.

[Anonymous No.7991221]

>>7991217
I thought their engines were FOSS?

[Anonymous No.7991238]

>>7991221
Didn't that stop once Carmack left?

[Anonymous No.7991245]

>>7990604
Those better be real, it's only a cool photo if they are.

[Anonymous No.7991247]

>>7991238
They only FOSS their last gen engine after the newest one came out. And yes it did stop when carmack left

[Anonymous No.7991551]

>>7990787
Where does American Mcgee work?

[Anonymous No.7991605]

>>7991221
They were FOSS but GPL. The requirement of disclosing source code killed any possibility of publishing on consoles, using proprietary middleware and DRM. You could buy a proprietary license (until ZeniMax Media killed id Tech licensing), and Carmack partially encouraged this.
>The primary intent of this release is for entertainment and educational purposes, but the GPL does allow commercial exploitation if you obey the full license. If you want to do something commercial and you just can't bear to have your source changes released, we could still negotiate a separate license agreement (for $$$), but I would encourage you to just live with the GPL.
>https://github.com/id-Software/Quake-2/blob/master/readme.txt

Some years after being kicked out of id Software (2014), Carmack revealed that he would have prefered to release the source code for the id Tech engines under the BSD license (a license that does not require source code disclosure). He reiterated this in 2021.

[Anonymous No.7991714]

>>7991112

[Anonymous No.7991741]

>>7990631
>Assuming Romero held onto stake in id, he's probably sitting on multi-millions.
Nah, the deal they had was that if you left, that was it for you, no more royalties from sales or anything. Romero probably actually has a decent bit of money still, but he's not seen any royalties for his work since he left.

[Anonymous No.7991751]

>>7991206
It wasn't just Pantera, it was Alice In Chains, Metallica, Judas Priest, AC/DC, Body Count, King Crimson, etc, along with some tracks from films like Aliens. There were also a couple of original compositions in there as well, however.
As for how, I don't fucking know, not even Bobby knows, he says he expected them to be sued. He did the music like that on request, on the condition that they were liable for any fallout, but it never happened.

[Anonymous No.7991757]

>>7991751
probably because the game was too dank

[Anonymous No.7991771]

>>7991206
>>7991751
The actual reason is Bobby Prince is also a copyright lawyer so he knows JUST how much you can get away with and not be sued.

[Anonymous No.7991775]

>>7991771
That's not true, and he'll tell you that himself.

[Anonymous No.7991931]

>>7991551
When you watch too much American Pickers.

[Anonymous No.7991953]

>>7991931
lmao that show is so corny and fake.
>>7990604
idk how much they made but they made money believe it.

[Anonymous No.7991978]

>>7990604
You killed a thread for a Google question.
Here you go you lazy fatass

>"According to PC Data, which tracked sales in the United States, Doom's shareware edition had yielded 1.36 million units sold and $8.74 million in revenue in the United States."
According to another 2 second Google, $9,000,000 in 1993 is worth $16,922,242.21 today

[Anonymous No.7992342]

>>7991978
>doom shareware
>only doom 1
fuck off. Also who cares if a thread no one has posted in in a fucking month died

[Anonymous No.7992486]

>>7991978
>>7992342
There's definitely a lot more.
>shareware sales, it was given away for free, though retailers and distributors were given the go-ahead to sell it for like $10 and keep all the money, even make their own copies (of course this wouldn't be part of iD's own revenue)
>mail order sales of the full version
>retail sales of Ultimate Doom on its own
>retail sales of Doom/Ultimate Doom in bundles/set
>retail sales of Doom 2
>retail sales of Final Doom
>retail sales of the console ports; Jaguar, 3DO, 32X, PSX, N64, Saturn, GBA (it's possible they only took lump sum licensing fees for some of these, rather than royalties)

[Anonymous No.7992580]

I'm assume that also includes the console ports.

[Anonymous No.7992823]

>>7992486
>A (it's possible they only took lump sum licensing fees for some of these, rather than royalties)
>Then on top of that he had licensing costs for getting the rights from id Software (Heineman suggests that was around $250,000)
>https://archive.vg/blog/the-gory-story-of-dooms-3do-nightmare

[Anonymous No.7992841]

>>7991221
No? iD's standard practice was to release a proprietary engine, make a shitload of money from it, and then release it as open source later as an attempt to entice college kids who were learning to program to familiarize themselves with iD's engines. Doom 3 ended this practice, and not because of personnel, but because iD stopped making engines anybody outside of their own company cared about.

[Anonymous No.7992906]

>>7991605
>Some years after being kicked out of id Software (2014), Carmack revealed that he would have prefered to release the source code for the id Tech engines under the BSD license (a license that does not require source code disclosure). He reiterated this in 2021.
The engines have been doing pretty well still.

What would chance if they had been BSD licenses?

[Anonymous No.7992931]

>tfw Romero never delivered on his threat

[Anonymous No.7992943]

>>7992906
BSD license basically means that you don't owe anybody anything, including if you're a giant megacorp. You look at code and you decide for yourself if you want to make your own version. You don't have to share said code like with GPL.

So for instance someone could have taken id tech 4 and turned it into their own engine that makes millions of dollars, all without id's consent or profit.

[Anonymous No.7992949]

>>7992931
how is pro tranny a good thing? Trans are disgusting faggots who literally rape their mom

[Anonymous No.7992952]

>>7992949
You don't belong here.

[Anonymous No.7992991]

>>7992906
They would have seen more widespread adoption, for one. Combining them wouldn't be such a legal nightmare. Like the developers of Unvanquished said:
>For details about licenses incompatibilities: Quake 3 is GPLv2+, Wolf:ET is GPLv3, and JediKnight is GPLv2-only. That last one was not opened by idSoftware itself and they miss the precious “or later”… They're all idTech3 derivatives and you can't legally merge the three as one.
>https://twitter.com/UNVofficial/status/1412558620349325316
Of course, id Software would have missed a lot of money in licensing, but Carmack never gave a single fuck about it. He hated giving support to other developers about "outdated" tech.

[Anonymous No.7993059]

>>7990631
>Assuming Romero held onto stake in id,
It was part of their company sturcture that that wasn't the case. He got at least 10m to make daikatana to start, plus eeked more money out of windows along the way, no idea how much he made from it, or how much of that went into it.
He had millions from doom 2. He didn't get shit from quake.

[Anonymous No.7993063]

>>7991204
I forgot about that. Empire of sin wasn't a commercial failure either. And I hear it's decent if you like that sort of game. But Romero doesn't even REALLY like that sort of game. That's his wife's game.
Theyre actually hiring more people right now for whatever future project they're working on.

[Anonymous No.7993067]

>>7993059
Doom, Doom 2, Final Doom, Heretic, and DWANGO, probably brought him quite a lot of money. He also did some endorsement deals with stuff like joysticks after iD.

[Anonymous No.7993070]

>>7992841
Doom 3 did get open sourced. Idtech 5 ended that run, and that was when Carmack left.

[Anonymous No.7993074]

>>7993067
>DWANGO
Right. That was making millions a month... Yeah. He probably has a shitload of money still. Especially if he invested it smartly, which a few id folk did apparently.

[Anonymous No.7993107]

>>7993074
>be Romero
>get together with some dudes and use the money you made on Wolfenstein 3D to make something that's even cooler
>you and your pals put your efforts in to make something you think will be just a blast to play
>you feel confident that it is once development has gone long enough and you've tested it lots
>at some point at the start of development you promised the world multiplayer gameplay, not with much thought on how that would actually be done, but you're sure the literal genius you're working with can figure it out
>he's busy, so it gets outsourced to a dude somewhere else
>find out later that this dude was a bullshitter who hasn't done shit, so brainiac has to do it anyway
>never done netcode, so he cobbles together something extremely rough, which works
>decide you should have player versus player multiplayer as well
>holy fuck this is incredible!
>literally set up an intercom in your office and the tech support guy's office so you can trash talk each other like jocks when fighting in multiplayer
>frequently do this shit well past midnight
>game wraps up and releases, big hit
>go around the web playing deathmatch with rando fans, who are having as much fun as you are
>after it's realized that the netcode is a catastrophe which floods your network with garbage data, it gets redone totally in patches, so it works even better now
>end up spending so much time playing this game in deathmatch with random fans that your work on the sequel actually suffers
>still that gets done and comes out pretty good
>score a deal with some literally fucking whos to set up an organized online service vastly streamlining playing the game and its sequel with people on the net
>the multiplayer is better than ever and you don't have to keep the tech support guy up at night or hit up people on the web, can just drop into a game with strangers any time, any place
>make progressively more $$$$$$ from this as it all unfolds
The feeling must have been unreal.