John Carmack says he provided id Software program a $1 million gross sales assure to permit Staff Beef to promote its VR ports on the official Quest retailer.
Staff Beef has ported a variety of traditional PC gaming titles to standalone VR, together with Doom, Doom 3, Return to Citadel Wolfenstein, Quake, Quake 2, Quake 3, Tomb Raider, Duke Nukem 3D, and the Star Wars Jedi Knight collection. At present, these ports require buying the unique video games on PC after which utilizing SideQuest to put in them onto your Quest, with the addition of Staff Beef’s modified code.
In a thread on X in regards to the modding staff’s Quake 3 VR port, a fan tagged the previous Oculus CTO and requested him to make the port “canon”. Carmack was a co-founder of id Software program, and the lead programmer for Quake 3. However id Software program was offered to ZeniMax in 2009, and ZeniMax was acquired by Microsoft in 2021. Thus, Carmack not controls the IP.
I attempted — we had a dialog with the powers that be at Id Software program, and I even provided to personally assure one million {dollars} in gross sales if they might enable Staff Beef to promote full variations of the traditional titles formally on the shop. I had some hope, however that was nonetheless too…
— John Carmack (@ID_AA_Carmack) February 10, 2025
Carmack responded by saying he “tried”, and had a dialog with “the powers that be at Id Software program”. He says he provided to “personally guarentee one million {dollars} in gross sales” to permit Staff Beef to promote its ports on Quest’s official retailer. However the implication is that his supply was rejected.
“I had some hope, however that was nonetheless too small potatoes to make something occur in a Microsoft firm,” Carmack writes.
Simply over a yr in the past, Carmack shared that he “acquired folks at id Software program enjoying the VR ports”, and that he was “hopeful” on the time. However it looks like even this and his monetary supply weren’t sufficient to make it occur.
