This August, Activision is set to publish id Software and Raven Software’s Wolfenstein. Last year, Electronic Arts announced that it had reached a publishing deal to publish id Software’s upcoming genre-bender, RAGE. Yesterday, dropping jaws to the ground and throwing John Romero into a fit, Bethesda Softwork’s parent company, ZeniMax Media, announced it had acquired id Software.
So what does this mean for Wolfenstein and RAGE? Well, absolutely nothing. According to Bethesda’s Pete Hines, existing agreements for those two games still stand; Wolfenstein will be published by Activision, and Electronic Arts will publish and market RAGE as planned.
But in the future, the inevitable follow-ups to those games belong to ZeniMax.
“Neither of those companies has rights to the sequels for those games,” Bethesda’s Pete Hines clarified for us last night.
According to yesterday’s press release “no changes will be made in the operations of id Software in the development of the games. With John Carmack still behind the wheel and the core id staff still in place, we don’t expect gamers will see any obvious changes… except for the name of the publisher on the box.
