GameInformer has posted an interview made with id Software's CEO, Todd Hollenshead. They talk about QuakeCon, Quake development, the Doom movie and id's "next thing". It's quite an interesting read. To quote,

Quote:

GI: Id Software has always been close to the community, not just with QuakeCon but with the mod community in general. That’s very different from a lot of companies. But other companies have learned from you as well with mod tools. Why is it that you guys do that more?

TH: You know, John Carmack, who is the co-founder of the company and the technical director, he looks to how he got his start in the industry, which he was a hacker and a game fan and got an opportunity to make games. He looks at guys in the mod community not as a threat. Which a lot of companies look at potential piracy, thinking about opening the content of their games and, “what are people going to do?” The fact that they can’t control what the mod community does is very scary to sort of all minds of intellectual property.

But John doesn’t give a s*** about that in all frankness. And sometimes, you know, I’m the CEO and I’m the guy that has to come in and go,”…and here’s the worries.” But given the choice of openness and giving to the community and concerns over restrictions on content, John always errs on the side of openness and I buy into that philosophy as well. I understand the concerns and it causes us some pain and piracy, but at the end of the day I think it is so worth it because there are people who love to play the games, and there are people who also love to work with the tools so that’s just another avenue for them to enjoy the games. And the stuff that they make, people play, and that extends the life of the product. So I think that’s it a great feedback loop.

We’ve benefited from the mod community in a number of ways. Our design lead and our art lead at the company came out of the mod community. They’re in leadership positions at id because we hired them because they were making excellent Doom wad files way way back in the day. That’s how they got their start in the industry.

Word.