John Carmack says he offered id Software a $1 million sales guarantee to allow Team Beef to sell its VR ports on the official Quest store.
Team Beef has ported a range of classic PC gaming titles to standalone VR, including Doom, Doom 3, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Quake, Quake 2, Quake 3, Tomb Raider, Duke Nukem 3D, and the Star Wars Jedi Knight series. Currently, these ports require purchasing the original games on PC and then using SideQuest to install them onto your Quest, with the addition of Team Beef's modified code.
In a thread on X about the modding team's Quake 3 VR port, a fan tagged the former Oculus CTO and asked him to make the port "canon". Carmack was a co-founder of id Software, and the lead programmer for Quake 3. But id Software was sold to ZeniMax in 2009, and ZeniMax was acquired by Microsoft in 2021. Thus, Carmack no longer controls the IP.
I tried — we had a conversation with the powers that be at Id Software, and I even offered to personally guarantee a million dollars in sales if they would allow Team Beef to sell full versions of the classic titles officially on the store. I had some hope, but that was still too…
— John Carmack (@ID_AA_Carmack) February 10, 2025
Carmack responded by saying he "tried", and had a conversation with "the powers that be at Id Software". He says he offered to "personally guarentee a million dollars in sales" to allow Team Beef to sell its ports on Quest's official store. But the implication is that his offer was rejected.
"I had some hope, but that was still too small potatoes to make anything happen in a Microsoft company," Carmack writes.
Just over a year ago, Carmack shared that he "got people at id Software playing the VR ports", and that he was "hopeful" at the time. But it seems like even this and his financial offer weren't enough to make it happen.
