Staring at the Sun

My brother bought Doom III yesterday. He apparently walked into an EB somewhere, and at that moment the store had just found out one of their pre-orders had been cancelled, so they had an extra copy. He of course jumped on the opportunity, and managed to get the game before it was officially released, and with a special action figure that was supposed to be for pre-orders only. The game is awesome. But what's even more awesome is this comment on slashdot:

Re:Quake3 engine open-source? When? (Score:5, Informative)
by John Carmack (101025) on Wednesday August 04, @03:13AM (#9876519)
By the end of the year. There are still a lot of higher priority things, but it is coming soon.

Hopefully punkbuster will keep the source release from having any negative impact on the player community.

John Carmack
_____________

Bwah! Quake III is going to be open source. Obviously it's no where near state of the art anymore, but it can run on any computer put out in the past 3 years, and it can still look very pretty (see Jedi Knight II for an example). I can see this being quite interesting all around.

Continuing on the open sourced games thread, I saw an article on Newsforge about Doom III being open sourced from the start. I have a few thoughts about this. First of all, the author makes no distinction between the engine (which is the only part of any of the Quakes that has or will be open source) and the game files (which is what makes the game what it is, and will never ever be open source. Fortunately for the author, the game released with the Doom III engine is more than just a tech demo (as Quake III was), so his suggestion isn't completely and utterly stupid, but it must be pointed out that the majority of the money that id made from Quake III was from licensing the engine to other companies. This isn't an option if the engine is open source. What the author is suggesting is that id thow away most of its revenue and depend solely on the sales of Doom III itself. Unless he means that they should also open source the game files, in which case he is suggesting that id throw away all of their revenue. I'm sorry, but I have to go into capitalist mode here and ask "what the hell is the incentive for making games then?" I mean, obviously they do enjoy doing it, but you can't just do things that you enjoy all the time unless it's going to make you money. The system they have now, where they make a good bit of money off of the engine, then open source it, is an excellent system and should be noted by other software companies (ahem, Microsoft), but to suggest that they should open source it from the start and not try to make any money off of it (especially since it's a game, and they can't sell support contracts for it) is downright stupid. End rant.

I had to get that off my chest while it was still fresh. I'm at work, so I have to go now.