"Steve Jobs doesn't care about games"

Id Software technical director John Carmack has told Eurogamer that the reason Apple doesn't "deeply get" gaming, as he put it during his QuakeCon keynote, is down to Apple's CEO.

"The truth is Steve Jobs doesn't care about games. This is going to be one of those things that I say something in an interview and it gets fed back to him and I'm on his s***head list for a while on that, until he needs me to do something else there. But I think that that's my general opinion. He's not a gamer," Carmack explained in an interview published today.

"It's difficult to ask somebody to get behind something they don't really believe in. I mean obviously he believes in the music and the iTunes and that whole side of things, and the media side of things, and he gets it and he pushes it and they do wonderful things with that, but he's not a gamer. That's just the bottom line about it."

With Mac owners now able to use Boot Camp to install Windows XP alongside OS X on Intel-based machines, Carmack also questioned the value of including native OS X support in cross-platform development plans - albeit something that is happening on id's upcoming action title Rage.

As he said during Thursday's QuakeCon keynote, however, he has high hopes for the iPhone.

"I think the iPhone is a potentially extremely important platform for a lot of reasons, and I think it could be the type of thing that really makes inroads into...does it kill the PSP. There are structural reasons why it's not going to kill the DS in there, but it certainly should be in there in the running there as a device that you can get modern, quality games for something, and I think it's a great platform for content and new talent on there," he explained.

He even suggested that two-man development teams could make "a couple of million dollars probably by having some breakout success".

For Carmack's part, id has a couple of iPhone projects in the early stages, but the company isn't showing anything much yet - except to say that neither is likely to be a port of a recognised shooter like Doom 3.

"There's obviously a few FPSes out there - Quake ports and stuff like that - and they're trying out different things and none of them are good yet," Carmack pointed out. "What you have to do when you're looking at a new platform is not take your favourite thing and try and cram it onto the platform, but you need to look at the platform and see what you can do, which is what we did on our conventional mobile devices."

For more on Apple, iPhone and id Software - and of course Rage, Doom 4, Quake Live, the console war and digital distribution, among other things - be sure to check out the full John Carmack interview elsewhere on Eurogamer.