Bethesda takes Rage from EA

By Robert Purchese Published 15 December, 2009

id Software's game changes hands.

ZeniMax Media has this minute announced the acquisition of the Rage publishing rights from EA.

Rage, of course, is id Software's next big game. And id Software was bought by ZeniMax earlier this year.

Deal technicalities were not provided, but EA will no longer have anything to do with the sale or marketing of Rage.

ZeniMax publishing label Bethesda will take control from here.

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About Robert Purchese

Bertie is Eurogamer's Senior Staff Writer. When he's not hunting down news stories he's often found playing with his kids or gabbling about fantasy games and strange online worlds.

Read more articles from Robert by visiting the Robert Purchese archive page.

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Comments (18) Latest comment 2 years ago

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  • mkreku #1 2 years ago

    Interesting.. may this have anything to do with Bethesda wanting to use id Tech 5 in their next Elder Scrolls..?

    /conspiracy

  • Quixz #2 2 years ago

    I'm sure EA got some cash out of this deal.
    I don't care who is publishing just as long as i get the game.

  • Bertie Verified Senior Staff Writer, Eurogamer.net #3 2 years ago

    An obvious and probably costly move for ZeniMax/Bethesda, but a good one nonetheless. Bethesda might have had some turkeys like Rogue Warrior, but Brink - and now presumably Rage - has had some very serious backing and the result is self evident.

  • GreyBeard #4 2 years ago

    I can imagine EA being reasonably happy to unload the title as the whole EA partners scheme is now pretty much dead, and so it no longer fits in with their overall publishing model.

  • lordofthedunce #5 2 years ago

    Very much looking forward to Rage. This and Brink have my attention right now.

  • EgbertoTheGreat #6 2 years ago

    Given the amount of titles that EA have been canning & staff they've been firing, I doubt they've been bought out, they've just dropped it & rights have reverted to id.

  • dr_faulk #7 2 years ago

    Thank Christ! This means we won't be subjected to unskippable videos of corporate logos and title screens to the sound of the latest Eminem single.

  • Hunam #8 2 years ago

    I dunno, id games usually sell pretty well, even DooM 3 on the Xbox sold pretty well, so I'd imagine Bethesda/Zenimax had to pay EA something for the exchange. Makes sense though, Bethesda seem to have a fair amount of wedge and I can see them wanting to fully internlise id as soon as possible, and now EA have their big shooter for next year, they probably didn't want to compete with themselves.

  • the_mtfr #9 2 years ago

    @mkreku, no it doesn't. EA was about to just publish the game. Unless they explicitly buy the ownership rights to Id's Tech 5 (which they haven't, and Id never sells them anyway), they don't have any say on who uses the engine later on. So no conspiracy. EA was just paid a huge lump of money so that Bethesda can get a huge lump of money from sales.

  • the_mtfr #10 2 years ago

    @EgbertoTheGreat so you think that because EA is reducing its operations, they're just gonna think "damn, Rage is sure gonna be a money loser... let's just drop it"?

  • Jonathan_Fakenham #11 2 years ago

    Good on them.

    Does this mean it will be rebranded as a Fallout game?

  • EgbertoTheGreat #12 2 years ago

    @the_mtfr, external developers are always the first to feel the pinch when a publisher cuts back. EA would look at the marketing budget needed to establish rage & question whether they would be better off spending that on an internally developed project.

  • Hunam #13 2 years ago

    For the record, Zenimax, who own id, also own Bethesda, and everything Zenimax publish is under the Bethesda label. They basically just bought back the right to publish their own game.

  • clockworkzombie #14 2 years ago

    @Colossus80
    There is of course a difference between a publisher and a developer. Even though Id is owned by Zenimax they are different developers to the Elder Scroll developers and the Fallout developers.

  • Murton #15 2 years ago

    This is very bad news for Rage Bethesda publish their own games and still manage to ship with hideous game breaking bugs that go unpatched, not to mention the alpha-like build quality of Failout 3.

    Hopefully this game will follow Id's track record for quality and not Bethesda's, but until it's released and we actually see it I remain sceptical.

  • Tiger_Walts #16 2 years ago

    I think this is more likely EA dropping a higher risk title than anything else. They probably aren't willing to invest in the marketing required to shift units in the scale they'd want. Bethesda will do a shorter run, run a lower profile campaign and concentrate on digital distribution for the PC release.

  • Xerx3s #17 2 years ago

    "So can we expect a broken game from launch that will not be patched? "

    This ffs. Bethesda make great games but every game from them on the 360 had at least one achievement for me that was impossible to unlock due to a bug, all bugs that they know about and refuse to fix.

  • Zaiz #18 2 years ago

    Oblivion was decently stable, actually. You just had to turn off autosaves of all sorts and it never crashed. The Unofficial Oblivion Patch fixed the thousands of silly little mistakes, though, like floating trees.

    But Fallout 3 is still pretty damn buggy, I have to admit. Turning off autosaves massively increased it's stability, though, so now it only rarely wigs out and crashes on me. Overall, though, not as bad as Halo 2's gigantic array of silly glitches and mistakes. Also less likely to crash than Starcraft, which crashes regularly on certain PCs whenever you try to exit a game. Oh, and Halo 2's glitches. Oh, and MW2's glitches, which plague multiplayer heavily, such as the delightful automatching system. Huh, I almost bet I could keep going on about products that started glitchy and never got properly patched...

    In other words, I honestly believe that Bethesda's glitches are most noteworthy because you suddenly lose 2 hours worth of content because you forgot to save like a silly goose. It doesn't excuse bad patching, but you should seriously be more aware of the fact that most games get shipped in buggy, as the only betas are for multiplayer games.