doom engine for sale :)

[keithktam]

if one want to buy the classic doom engine, how much would it cost these day???

hehehe

[printz]

0 euros :|

Or, from a fanboy's point of view, it should cost at least 3,000,000 dollars. It's just that valuable. It's DOOM, for crying out loud ("aaaaaaahhhh").

[Gez]

I can sell it to you for $1000.

[keithktam]

Gez said:

I can sell it to you for $1000.

wonderful. if it was true, i actually think this is a fare price, you know what i mean.
lol

[Kirby]

No, I actually don't know what you mean. Not to seem condescending or whatnot, but are you asking people the price they would pay for the Doom Engine back in the day if they knew it would become such a big video game? Or is there something I'm missing?

[GreyGhost]

Gez said:

I can sell it to you for $1000.

Make that Zimbabwean dollars and you've got a deal.

[Maes]

If formulated more accurately, it actually rises a very good question: if someone makes a commercial game today based on the Doom engine, would there still be a licensing fee akin to e.g. Raven Software's, back in the day? What about the Quake/Quake II/Quake III engines, being outdated notwistanding?

This formulation explicitly leaves out source ports since those require the final user to have the original game (and its data) in some form, and thus money is not made exclusively on the new developer's side (in the case of some non-free source ports).

It would seem that, since it's under the GPL license it would not be possible anymore (?) to ask royalties for commercial use of the technology. What were the terms of the first "Doom license" ?

[Gez]

The Doom source license was non-profit.

The GPL explicitly allows commercial use without royalties.

In fact, two different companies have already sold iPhone games based on the Doom engine, using Freedoom for content.

[Maes]

Well, then that settles it: the Doom engine costs exactly [currency]0.00

[Aliotroph?]

Exactly. Those guys who ported Freedoom to the iPhone are actually doing this. I wonder if they made much money off it. There was some bitterness about charging for work the community had done for free.

[Spleen]

Maes said:

It would seem that, since it's under the GPL license it would not be possible anymore (?) to ask royalties for commercial use of the technology. What were the terms of the first "Doom license" ?

ID continued to license ID Tech 3 after the Quake 3 source was released, to allow companies to release closed-source games. I imagine it would be the same for ID Tech 1, depending on whether ID cares enough to license it to you.

If you're looking at a closed-source commercial release of a source port, however, there's also the issue of where the rest of the code comes from. You could sell a closed-source version of a port with BSD code, but the most popular one (ZDoom) also has FMod and Build code. For those two, you would have to get a commercial license for Build from Ken Silverman, and a commercial license for FMod, in addition to a commercial license for ID Tech 1 (hah, a hybrid ID Tech1/Build engine!). Regarding GPL ports, however, they have GPL code from so many sources that it's practically impossible to do a closed-source release legally.

[Quasar]

Spleen said:

Regarding GPL ports, however, they have GPL code from so many sources that it's practically impossible to do a closed-source release legally.

Just as an example to drive that point home, you'd need the permission of all the following people in order to change the license on the Eternity Engine:
id Software, Raven Software, Chi Hoang, Lee Killough, Jim Flynn (possibly deceased), Rand Phares, Ty Halderman, Stan Gula, Simon Howard, Colin Phipps, Florian Schulze, Andrey Budko, Martin Hedenfalk, Shay Green, DJ Delorie, myself, SoM, Joe Kennedy, Julian Aubourg, Joel Murdoch, Kate, and anarkavre. At *least*. There are other contributors but I didn't list them because their code in EE is under BSD or public domain licenses and therefore wouldn't require permissions to use.