I think you are undervaluing the codebase, if he used a codebase that was touched by 10 engineers with an average pay of 100k, the codebase cost 1 million to make in just one year, it would be hard for any engineer no matter how good to match the man hours of 10 engineers, Zenimax owned that knowledge and paid a high price for the value
> It's also an outrageous insinuation that John Carmack, the father of the FPS, needed "knowledge gained from Zenimax" in order to make Oculus happen
He sold that knowledge to Zenimax for $100m and was on the clock. Perhaps he shouldn't have sold id Software if he wanted to freely use the IP. I'm reminded of those MySQL folk who cashed out to Sun/Oracle but still wanted to exploit on on the IP afterwards.
