they would lend their skills and names to a product that was going to flop
Sure why not, Carmack has always focused on tech for tech's sake. ID's games are almost always panned for everything but the tech. Abrash is similarly oriented. I have no doubt they will produce great VR hardware and software, but that still leaves FB in charge of the artistic direction. Throw in a couple of patents and it will be 2030 before another company can get really competitive.
Their games may have been "panned" (I don't know...I don't follow the gaming press) but clearly bazillions of people found them enjoyable enough to cough up the cash (the only "review" that really matters).
I mean, Carmack was rich enough to fund his own space program.
Abrash worked at Valve which has pretty much exclusively made critically acclaimed titles, but that had less to do with Abrash's artistic direction. Carmack made most of his money from his tech, not from the games. Id games after Quake 3 maybe broke even or turned enough profit to give employees a modest bonus, but were never very popular. (The quickly dwindling) Id fanboys were pretty much the only people buying their games after 2005 (Doom 3).
Id (and Carmack) made most of their money from engine licensing. As Abrash mentions in this post, even Valve licensed the Quake engine code -- you can imagine how that must have made them so much more money than the couple hundred thousand copies of Quake 4 sold if they had any decent licensing business model.
A vast majority of capital-class game companies over a decade old that are still alive now, make/made almost all their money from anything but the games they designed/developed -- but instead from engines (Valve, Epic, Crytek, Id), sales platforms (Valve), publishing (EA, Activision), etc. Blizzard is more or less the only exception surviving almost solely on direct revenue from the games they've developed (mostly just WoW, although all their games are very well-loved).
So please don't jump to the conclusion that people like Carmack make the money to launch rockets from selling Doom sequels. The game design industry is not nearly that lucrative, even if the game tech one is moderately so.
Wait: so you're claiming that there's no money in selling games, but somehow the people selling games for no money can give lots of money to the people who wrote the engine?
It is about like selling pickaxes to miners during the gold rush. There are hits that bring in a lot of money. That money turns around and goes out the doors for fancy tools. Those tools are then setup somewhere where there isn't any gold and you end up a poor fool. As an example Ion Storm probably paid ID a few million for their id tech licenses, produced a couple of hits and a couple of failures. The failures were big enough to kill the company.
Sure why not, Carmack has always focused on tech for tech's sake. ID's games are almost always panned for everything but the tech. Abrash is similarly oriented. I have no doubt they will produce great VR hardware and software, but that still leaves FB in charge of the artistic direction. Throw in a couple of patents and it will be 2030 before another company can get really competitive.