While id Software has traditionally licensed off its in-house game engines to third-parties, last year’s acquisition by Elder Scrolls and Fallout 3 publisher ZeniMax has signaled an end to this practice.

Company boss Todd Hollenshead tells Eurogamer that it has no intention of licensing out its id Tech 5 middleware, pointing to a “competitive advantage” as one of the key factors behind the decision. Currently, the multiplatform-focused tech powers Rage and is planned for use in the yet-to-be revealed DOOM 4.

Hollenshead, however, did not rule out the possibility of using id Tech 5 in third-party titles published under Bethesda’s umbrella.

It’s like, look, this is a competitive advantage and we want to keep it within games we publish – not necessarily exclusively to id or id titles, but if you’re going to make a game with id Tech 5 then it needs to be published by Bethesda, which I think is a fair thing.

Despite the massive success of  Epic’s Unreal Engine 3, Hollenshead feels content with the route id took beginning this generation, noting that it was never the company’s intention to focus on technology licensening.

“It was that we made the technology for our games, and the philosophy was that with the one team the technology was wasted if you’re just using it on one game, so we wanted to be able to license it out to a small number of developers,” explained Hollenshead.

id Tech 5 only for Bethesda titles [Eurogamer]

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