Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

by David Kushner

Instead, Jay—determined to make id’s business style as innovative as its games—focused on setting up the company’s distribution and marketing. He established a toll-free number to field orders and set up a deal with a fulfillment house. Since they were self-publishing Doom, they would be getting twice the earnings they had on Wolfenstein. Games distributed through the regular retail channels would bleed cash to middlemen. Every time someone bought a game at CompUSA, the retailer would take money, then pay the distributor, the distributor would take money, then pay the publisher, the publisher would take money, then pay the developer. By going shareware, id was cutting them all out, taking eighty-five cents for every dollar sold; the game would be listed at around forty dollars. Jay figured Doom, like Wolfenstein, would rely on word of mouth. While big guns like Nintendo were spending millions on marketing and advertising, id would take out only one small ad in a gaming magazine for Doom. The goal, then, was to get the Doom shareware into as many hands as possible.