id goes mobile

id Software has opened a new mobile games production division, reports USA Today.

The studio’s new department will work on mobile versions of its Wolfenstein and Quake titles and follows the successful introduction of its Doom RPG two years ago, and follow-up Orcs and Elves, which has recently made the leap to Nintendo DS as well. Doom RPG has sold over 1m copies and Orcs and Elves 400,000 in its mobile form.

Those games were made with id in conjunction with Fountainhead Entertainment, a games firm founded by Katherine Anna Kang, wife of id co-founder John Carmack.

id’s former director of business development at id, Kang will now serve also as id Mobile’s president.

"We are operating on the assumption that mobile gaming has a potential for huge growth," said Carmack. "It’s at a tipping point. Everybody has a phone, and almost every phone is powerful enough to do good games on it."

Carmack added that id’s reputation will help raise the profile of what is often considered "the ghetto of game development": "It’s going to be easier to attract more people to work for a project when they are actually working for id."

"The whole reason we are in the mobile arena now is I was just really appalled at how bad [mobile games] were," Carmack said. "We’re already making profit on 2 million units of games sold, but we are kind of holding out this hope there might be a breakout moment when the industry gets five to 10 times larger."