Last week at Quakecon, John Carmack in his keynote speech, revealed that Id software is currently working on a top-secret project which will land on all next-gen consoles and PC simultaneously. Upon questioning, Carmack refused to comment on the topic strongly suggesting that Id is sticking with its "When its done" slogan.
Carmack went on with his speech discussing different topics about the gaming industry that lasted for about two hours. One of the key note of his speech was that he finds XBox360 to be very easy to develop for compared to the CELL processor. Although he did speak candidly about how he finds it not ok for Microsoft to secretly diminish OpenGL from its next Windows platform. Here, he was all praise for Sony with their efforts to make the CELL processor an open source platform and said that it will bring lots of benefits to independent developers.
While Carmack was pretty easy going on the difficulties of both the Sony and Microsoft consoles. Id software CEO, Todd Hollenshed wasn't acting on the same lines at all. In a Q&A session with Game Informer, he was quite blunt about sharing his thoughts on both the platforms , " I'm not really one to put words in Johns mouth but what I do know is that we've had 360 stuff for a while and it was relatively easy to bring our internal project onto 360. We just got the PS3 stuff recently and it was relatively more difficult to bring that up on the PS3. So John's first impressions are, 360 – great, PS3 – pain in my ass."
Later in the interview, Todd Hollenshed admitted that the Sony platform may very well be superior to its rivals and clarified Id's stance towards the Sony platform by saying, "I think we'll have to wait and see, but I don't think that's going to ultimately change the way we're going to approach developing on PS3. Carmack knows from a technology horsepower standpoint that it'll do everything that we want it to do, so we're committed to it."
In the end, Hollenshed added that they will only release details about their future products when the time is right. And there is a small possibility that their future IP's may get showcased at next years E3 event depending on how much farther they are in development.