> I wonder why ID didn't continue to compete with Unreal in the middleware engine. IIRC from one of his later talks, Carmack wasn't interested in tech licensin

> I wonder why ID didn't continue to compete with Unreal in the middleware engine. IIRC from one of his later talks, Carmack wasn't interested in tech licensing and it was mostly the other owners pushing the idea. I remember even before Doom 3 was released and the Quake 3 engine was in its apex in terms of licensing (basically the most licensed of their engines by far), their licensing page wrote that all the support you'd get was a day with Carmack to explain some bits. > How Unreal went from some mediocre engine Unreal was never a mediocre engine, even from its first release it had amazing tools and a very flexible architecture. I'd say that even if the rendering tech wasn't sometimes behind id (i always noticed that id would come up with a neat new idea and the next UE would polish it up - the only time this didn't happen was with Rage and UE4), their toolset and architecture is what made other devs go after them and their stance to support (you'd get constant updates and documentation and i think at some point they set up an internal "community site" for people licensing their engine) was the icing on the cake.