La nouvelle date un peu, mais on ne l'a pas manquée, c'est le principal. Suite à un coup de gueule lancé par Doom3Maps.de, le plus gros site allemand dédié à Doom III, Todd Hollenshead s'est senti obligé de clarifier les choses dans une longue lettre qui leur a adressée. Ces derniers affirmaient que la communauté n'était pas suffisamment supportée par id Software, ce que contredit Todd, lequel remet même en doute dans certains passages la justesse des raisons qui ont poussé Mortiz à publier son coup de gueule.

Une lecture très intéressante dans laquelle Todd remet à sa place un fan en mal d'attendre. Moritz conclu qu'on a tout de même une bonne nouvelle : id Software fait son possible pour ne pas allonger outre mesure le développement qui doit avoir assez duré à leur goût.

Todd Hollenshead a parlé. Les fans auront leur dû lorsque le jeu sera terminé. Dans la suite, la lettre de Todd.

Moritz,

I appreciate that you run a DOOM 3 fansite. I would imagine that it's a lot of work and there's little reward apart from the personal satisfaction of a job well done. We would like to see lots more of them like yours. And we certainly appreciate the support of the fans that have made our games among the most popular in the world. However, I believe very strongly that you are just way off base here. Perhaps you are venting frustration and you will feel differently in a month or two. Unfortunately, unless you change your mind, I doubt you and I will be able to reconcile our viewpoints, meaning this response will end up being a waste of my time, but I'm going to go ahead and try anyway.

Firstly, to some extent, magazines and "fan sites" are in competition with one another to report information or to be "THE source" of information about games. Obviously, your site is about DOOM 3, so you'd like to have lots of info about DOOM 3 before anyone else has it: new, exclusive screenshots, interviews with John Carmack, etc. so that you can build the popularity of your site. However, we cannot cater to a single website or news source for DOOM 3.

This time around, and for this specific opportunity, we went with magazine coverage because we believed that was the best way to get the latest information out to our fans in an impartial and unbiased way. If a magazine is going to spend much ink, page space, and especially a cover devoted to a game, they want to make sure, as best as they can, that someone else doesn't "scoop" them and ruin their treat for their readers by publishing everything first. That's fair because the magazine spends time and money to send a writer to our office, work with us on the cover, devotes resources to making the story good, etc. This isn't just DOOM 3, but every game in every magazine is treated the same way.

It's hypocritical to complain that the fans don't get to see the screenshots while at the same time complaining that the shots were only posted on CGW and GameStar's web sites, where anyone in the world could access them. Your real complaint here is that *you* didn't get to show the shots on your own website. That's understandable, but it's hardly standing up for the fans. (By the way, CGW and GameStar were not the only magazines that ran that DOOM 3 cover. I'm not sure how many we ended up working with, but suffice it to say that I can't think of a significant market that we didn't work with across Europe as well as the Pacific Rim.)

Moreover, to argue that there "is no support of fansites" and complain about the "lack of interaction between id Software and [our] fans" is to completely ignore that we spend enormous resources in time and money to put on QuakeCon every year where almost every single member of the team personally interacts with almost anyone interested in saying hello. This year in particular, we unveiled DOOM 3 multiplayer not to the press or to the retailers or to anyone in the game trade, but to our FANS! The fans and websites that came out got a real first shot at playing the game hands on and drawing their own conclusions, and writing about their impressions and posting them on messageboards and elsewhere across the 'Net.

We also devote a *huge* amount of time while developing the game to ensure that mod and map authors will be able to do their thing and have fun making their own creations. This is where the rubber really meets the road. Lots of companies now talk about supporting their communities, but id Software was one of the few companies bold enough to open up game content for fans to play with back in the Wolf 3D original DOOM days when everyone else was making closed content games. The whole existence of the mod community can trace it's roots directly back to the old days of .wad files.

What we're doing right now is focusing on finishing the game. So I hope that people who are upset over not having more information about the game will understand that our primary job is to make DOOM 3 kick ass and get the game done so that they can play it. That means that we don't really have any time to work with fansites or other sites that want new screenshots, interviews, and other media that it takes time to prepare which is time that could otherwise be spent on the game.

So please be patient and we'll be done as soon as we can. Then you and everyone else who wants to can play it. We appreciate everyone's patience and their anticipation for the game. And I believe that most people can appreciate the fact that we're intent on working on the game to complete it, instead of spending lots of time talking about it and promoting it. Of course, our job as a game developer is to make a great game more than anything else. And that's what we're in the process of doing.

Regards,

Todd Hollenshead
CEO
id Software, Inc.