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DOOM: Sharing the Horror
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The player response was ecstatic and instantaneous, and the DOOM phenomenon took off like a bullet. According to David Kushner's Masters of DOOM, id made a startling $100,000 in registration fees the day after the game was first uploaded. As of September 1994, id had sold over 100,000 DOOM registrations. id biz guy Jay Wilbur noted that this represented the shareware industry standard registration rate of about 1%, meaning that around 10 million copies of the DOOM shareware were in circulation. That's an incredible saturation number for any game, much less one that, to that point, had never appeared in a retail store.

In October of that year id followed its Wolfenstein pattern, and partnered with the nascent GT Interactive to release a retail sequel called DOOM II. Unlike Spear of Destiny, DOOM II was a great success, becoming one of the most popular PC action titles ever. In 1996, id once again relied on shareware to distribute the first episode of its new game, Quake, this time supplementing the expected downloadable shareware with a CD-ROM version that sold at retail for $9.95. Gamers could call id and purchase a code that unlocked the full version of the game from the demo disk. Thus the cycle continued.

Changing the Industry

Quake would be id's last shareware production.

id's innovative use of the shareware concept had a number of positive results. Since id avoided expensive retail channels, it was able to offer a superior product at a superior price. Letting players experience a full third of its game for free also seemed (and was) very generous, resulting in unprecedented gamer-to-gamer word of mouth. Best of all, it established a new trend among PC action game makers, and full-featured game demos soon became commonplace.

Unfortunately, the era of value-packed game demos is now almost over, as most game software is huge in file size and can offer only a level or two in exchange for a several hundred megabyte download. Regardless, it's partially due to id that we have these demos at all, making it just another way that DOOM, the ultimate outsider, rewrote the rules of the game industry. •

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Embracing
the Norm

Quake was the last game id sold through shareware. 1997's Quake II had a three level "technology test" released, but it wasn't quite the same. Since then, all of id's games have been retail only and marketed by huge publishers. It seems that shareware was a great way to get itself on the map, but perhaps id felt it had outgrown the concept by 1997.

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