j-e-f-f-e-r-s said:
When you make DOOM and Quake, I'm kinda of the opinion that you can not make anything relevant the rest of your career, money still shouldn't be an issue. When was the last time the Rolling Stones had a relevant album? Yet there they are, millionaires every last one of them, and still selling out stadiums around the world.
The reason the Stones keep making boatloads of money is because people keep buying their
old songs and albums and paying insane prices to see them play live. Plus they get royalties any time someone uses their music in a movie or plays it on the radio or whatever. Also sure, Mick and Keef are almost certainly still loaded, but on the flipside Ronnie Wood has gone from being a millionaire to broke more than once, despite being a member of the Stones for over 30 years. Having loads of money doesn't stop you doing stupid things with it.
And that's the difference between id and the Stones. id may still garner a ton of respect from basically inventing the FPS genre and coming out with titles like Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake, but those games aren't actually making them any
money these days. And they don't play stadiums. And respect alone doesn't pay the bills.
They're not like Blizzard, which has the luxury of taking its sweet time developing games because ever since 2004 it's had WOW subscriptions paying the bills. They're not like Valve either, which has the profits from Steam keeping it afloat and in no hurry to release HL3. At best, id have had engine licensing and as others have discussed, they're not exactly the flavour of the month any more.
Quite simply, I don't see how they could possibly afford to take 10 years to develop a game. It'd be like the Stones giving up all their back catalog income, and trying to live off just the one stadium show every decade or something.