You beat me to it... Pretty wild! Want to bet on how long "no changes will be made in the operations of id Software in the development of its games"? Although Bethesda is fairly good at what they do. - Ben Garney

There will be changes. There are always changes. It just depends on your time horizon. - Jeff Tunnell

It will be cool to see how idtech surfaces in their games. - Ben Garney

Can't say I'm hardly surprised, Carmack and a few other principles are reaching retiring / part time age. They have two AAA products and several misc. ones. They have ballooned in staff (from ~25 FTE in 2007 to I think almost a 100 FTE currently, if not more?). My numbers aren't direct, just remembering. They have royalties and licensing fees coming in, but it felt unsustainable and hard to compete in their current space without cutbacks in scope of the # of projects or something along the lines of this acquisition. - Timothy Aste

Woah! If Carmack is retirement age, what does that make me? - Jeff Tunnell

Last I saw they had 60 people just a while ago. - Jeff Tunnell

Lol. I think retirement was a bad choice of words. Maybe career change? - BigMonkGames

From today's Venturebeat article: "JC: We have 105 now. The ramp up won’t be done this year. We hope we don’t lose anybody. We won’t intentionally lose anybody. We will continue to look for the best talent." - Timothy Aste

That is a big nut to crack each month. - Jeff Tunnell

An Aside. Damn. I wish Friendfeed had Twitter's popularity. Even with a small amount of followers, this kind of conversation could not happen on Twitter. - Jeff Tunnell

Absolutely. These are great. Facebook is pretty neat too, I "friended" Kenneth Scott (who was the driving force behind the id Art for the last 10 years) and was interesting to see the discussions going on in his profile. He was a bit taken back since he just took a job at Microsoft last year and was surprised to hear this. Comments and streaming media are the new forums, I'm hoping Google wave can consolidate a lot of this stuff. - Timothy Aste

Here is the link to the VentureBeat interview with Carmack and Zenimax CEO Robert Altman: http://venturebeat.com/2009... - Timothy Aste

It's a great interview, Venturebeat has quickly become one of my favorite news sites at the moment, they have great quality articles and fast news for the web/games/startup spaces. - Timothy Aste

Also, I haven't seen the "login using Twitter" option before (sits next to Facebook connect). I'm sure you guys probably have, but this is an awesome idea to support for our websites at some point since tens of millions of active web users have twitter accounts. Combining Facebook/Twitter 1-click login access seems like it would cover our entire target demographic. :) - Timothy Aste