Id's Todd Hollenshead has said that their new engine will not be available for license outside of ZeniMax.

Hollenshead said at this year's QuakeCon that id Tech 5, the engine that powers and DOOM 4 will not be for sale.

Hollenshead said: "It's going to be used within ZeniMax, so we're not going to license it to external parties. 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."

He was careful to distance id from Epic's strategic focus on middleware tech. He added: "I think that [Epic] made a strategic choice to focus on the middleware service stuff, and we never pretended to be focused on technology licensing. 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. Epic's made a good business out of that so kudos to them, but I wouldn't change the way we've done things."

Thanks GamesIndustry.biz.

By Ewan Aiton