Put blame where blame is due. It's the code Bethesda/Obsidian wrote, not the code that they purchased from Emergent.
I doubt if there is anyone left who thinks that offers of v1gra and riches from Nigerian princes are real opportunities.
Do you just have a feeling that people stopped being stupid or can you cite a specific date and time you saw the majority of humanity show some shred of intellect over greed?
Now, one way this may work is if they sell the engine much cheaper than Unreal (currently around $1m/sku). If you can get 5 for a lot less than that and give Bethesda the going publisher take on a shipped title (50% of revenue...thats probably a bit conservative). Then the engine choice might start to make sense for some 3rd party studios. But at $1m/sku *AND* giving Bethesda a % of revenue?....no way, no how.
I think the adoption of 5 will be very similar to that of idtech 4. Id games will use it, naturally, and those studios that exist by making id IP games, Raven, Grey Matter, Splash Damage, and Human Head, will use it as they make more id IP games. Some other independent studios may try it. But, for the most part, it will be an internal Bethesda technology.
Bethesda doesn't have a partner publishing program like EA and THQ do. That implies it will be a more traditional, "We own the IP" publisher/developer relationship. That's especially worrisome for smaller independent studios. Larger studios can possibly have the clout to maintain their IP. But, most large studios are not independent, they're owned by publishers that compete with Bethesda.. There's no way an EA, Activision, THQ, TakeTwo, or Ubisoft studio will use idtech5. Along with that liability on the engine there are no shipped games to prove the engine is viable, it's not known what the dev support will be like, and there is no one outside of Id that has experience with it.
Unreal rules the roost right now. There's no publisher lock-in, there are hundreds of games to prove it's viability, the dev support is all online, easily referenced, and complete, and the widespread use of it means that it is easy to find programmers, designers, and artists that have experience on the toolset. idtech5 has to not only be as good as unreal in all of those areas, it arguably has to be better. A studio that knows how to make games with Unreal would have to dump all of their institutional knowledge if they went with idtech5. That's a huge loss of competitive advantage.
Idtech5 might do amazingly well. Given the long timespan since choosing an id engine to make a game was commonplace, the explosion of Unreal as the defacto engine middleware, a decent number of other competing engine middleware packages (Gamebryo, Crytek, Unity, etc...), and the Bethesda lockin I am not expecting idtech5 to be a disrupting force in the game development industry.
You copied someone else's idea. They're not happy about that. Maybe they're in the right or maybe you are. Either way you should hold off on the righteous indignation until you give up your opinions and educate yourself on the matter at hand.
Work is the crab grass in the lawn of life. -- Schulz