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You could make the argument that because of Steam having such reach / monopoly on the PC gaming market, Steam (and by extension Valve) is effectively the publisher of games like that, and a very large one at that. There's GoG that mostly focuses on vintage games, and Epic that spends tons of money to get (timed?) exclusives on indie games + free handouts, but I'm not sure how well it's working for them to get market share.

But granted, the indie game market (and mid-sized publishers like Paradox) are super important right now to fight against the AAA / massive budget game devs and publishers.

Mind you, ID has been a bit of an underdog for a long while; their games are / were good, but did not become crazy big like their EA / Activision counterparts; the 2009 Wolfenstein sold poorly ("only" 100K units in the first month); The New Order, its sequel, did a lot better (400K sold in about a month and a half), and Doom 2016 was a hit.




GoG does have a bunch of new games though. And IIRC they are owned by CD Project Red who are doing some big games now :)


Yeah GOG hasn't "focused" on vintage games for at least half a decade now (and the switch from GoG and the original acronym to branding wise it's just GOG and its own "word" these days) and while back compat remains a core strength (though one as much exported at this point as most Publishers have paid attention to what GOG was doing and released many of the same games with the same tricks [ScummVM, DOSBOX, etc] on Steam and other platforms) has kept up with Steam (and Epic) on every major AAA release and a large swath of Indies so long as the publisher will allow a DRM Free release. Plus of course CD Projekt Red's own AAA releases (Witcher series, Cyberpunk) as obviously they want DRM Free publishing where available.


I'm not certain if you enjoy remakes or not - but I think GOG is pretty much single handedly responsible for making them a thing. Things like AoE2 (Age of Empires) HD & DE probably wouldn't exist if AoE and AoM (Age of Mythology) didn't get a bunch of surprise sales on GoG. I'm hoping it'll also lead to some of the older IPs that died off with the likes of SSI getting resurrected into new titles - Imperialism 1 & 2 were pretty amazing games long before the likes of Victoria 2 came about.


Both CD Projekt Red and GOG are actually just subdivisions of CD Projekt.


id Software -- the makers of Doom 2016 -- is owned by ZeniMax Media, which has been acquired by Microsoft as per the featured article we are discussing


Correct me if I'm wrong, but was id actually involved in the 2009 Wolfenstein or in New Order? I think not. However, they did develop Doom 2016...


They are involved for the technical aspects beyond merely MachineGames using id engines. MachineGames in a lot of ways acts like another id software studio, but it is free to form its own flavor.

MachineGames also has (uncredited?) work on Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal.


Wolfenstein was made by Machinegames. Though there is quite a bit of overlap between the two studios during production.


2009 - they were producers, but the development was done by Raven Software and published by Activision. So not really involved other than owners of IP?

New Order - not at all, maybe as engine developers. Right for that IP were transferred to MachineGames in 2010 right after ZeniMax got hold of them.

As for Doom 2016 - they enlisted a lot of outside help after Doom 4 was scraped. Bethesda's game directors helped them a lot because they already figured how to make "old ip" to sell well with modern gamers (see Fallout 3).

side note:

I don't think id managed to get deliver a lot of good games since John Romero left. (just like John Romero didn't deliver many good games since the separation)

John Romero and John Carmack were like a dream team, but without each other it was meh.


FYI the 'id' in 'id Software' is lowercase. It's a word (not an initialism or acronym) so 'Id' would be more grammatically correct, though the name of the company is nevertheless lowercase.




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