Marketing and Licensing
The engine was first publicly shown during the 2007 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference keynote address, then was later shown privately to an audience of potential licensees at E3 2007. The first public demonstration focusing exclusively on the engine took place at QuakeCon in the same year during the annual keynote held by John Carmack. The game engine is being used in id's current games, Rage and upcoming Doom 4.
An interview with John Carmack, the lead graphics engine developer at id, indicated that like its predecessors, id Tech 5 will eventually be released as open source. The move to open source will likely come many years after id Tech 5's release as a proprietary engine. At QuakeCon 2007, Carmack told LinuxGames that he would integrate as little proprietary software as possible into id Tech 5, as "eventually id Tech 5 is going to be open source also. This is still the law of the land at id, that the policy is that we’re not going to integrate stuff that’s going to make it impossible for us to do an eventual open source release."
At QuakeCon 2010, id CEO Todd Hollenshead announced that while id Tech 5 could be shared with internal ZeniMax developers, the engine will not be available for external licensing. On November 10 of 2010 it was announced that the first ZeniMax internal developer to work with the engine will be MachineGames.
Read more about this topic: Id Tech 5