Topic: Rage Quakecon 2009 Trailer

[idolminds]

Oh man, this news makes me happy. EA is no longer publishing RAGE.

ZENIMAX ACQUIRES RIGHTS TO PUBLISH RAGE

December 15, 2009 (Rockville, MD) – ZeniMax Media Inc., parent company of id Software, announced today that it has picked up the publishing rights for RAGE™, the video game under development at id Software.

RAGE will be published by Bethesda Softworks, another ZeniMax subsidiary. As a result, Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ: ERTS) will not be involved in the sales and marketing of RAGE. The ongoing development of RAGE is unaffected by this development.

[Xessive]

Awesome news! ZeniMAX has been a beneficent publisher so far.

[Quemaqua]

That's totally awesome.  ZeniMax is rather a huge company, but they're very hands-off from what I can gather.  Haven't seen them really muddle with anything too much yet, they usually just let people do what they do (at least from what I've seen and paid attention to).  Hopefully this means only good things for all of us.

EA's gotten better.  The fact that they released a number of games with only disk checks is very encouraging.  But then at the same time, they way Dragon Age's DLC was handled is like... horrible upon horrible.  So I'm definitely down to see them continue to lose business until they really fix their methods. And yes, I know that Bioware could have had something to do with that too, but either way EA should have been smart enough to say "No, this is a bad idea and bad for our customers".

[MysterD]

As long as Zenimax don't screw-up Rage's launch w/ some silly DRM scheme for Rage PC and/or some silly DLC plan for Rage PC, this is great news!

[scottws]

I wonder if this is some sort of sign that EA is struggling due to the DRM backlash and poor economy.

[MysterD]

I wonder if this is some sort of sign that EA is struggling due to the DRM backlash and poor economy.

I think when they laid off 1500 employees, that was the first really clear sign that EA was struggling. I'd say this selling to Zenimax probably is another one.

I really think Rage is going to sell well - just b/c it's an Id game. How could it NOT sell well?

[scottws]

Keep in mind that the core gamer market doesn't know id from Adam.  At best they heard about them being big on the PC.

I don't think it's a lock that it will sell well.  Heck, I'm a holdover from ids Doom glory days and I don't have much interest in the game.

[idolminds]

This probably has more to do with the way id handles their publishing deals: its always a new partnership for each game. Now that id is owned by a publisher its safe to say they will be publishing all their future games. EA has no stake in the RAGE franchise, they can throw money at it and promote it but their involvement will end after that first title. In EAs mind they can pass that back to Zenimax and then throw that money into an IP where they are more likely to get long-term profits from.

[MysterD]

Keep in mind that the core gamer market doesn't know id from Adam.  At best they heard about them being big on the PC.

I don't think it's a lock that it will sell well.  Heck, I'm a holdover from ids Doom glory days and I don't have much interest in the game.

To me, I think Rage is the most interesting game I've seen from them in a LONG TIME - probably since Quake 2.