Technology stack today is a commodity.

For big publishers, such as EA, the entire cost of development (design, art, code, testing, packaging) is somewhere between 10-40% of entire cost of product. That's not even counting the franchises as a whole. It simply doesn't matter, revenue is completely unrelated to technology. By consequence, it doesn't matter.

But stays that way because of middleware, does it not? I mean if they had to build an engine every time that would raise time and cost significantly. So I would think it does matter.

Certainly I think we're at a point where the impact of his work is less visible -- back in the day iD was basically first to come with Wolf3D-style, DOOM-style and Quake-style engines. We haven't had any super-huge paradigm shifts in graphics (like say, if someone came up with a viable ray-tracing engine) only a steady and much less earth-shattering advancement. Still, though the advances that have happened may not be as in-your-face as they once were, there's still a lot of great technology being invented, and Carmack has been in that mix all along -- Think Mega-Texture.

Another part of this perception is that there are games which have usurped the "graphics crown" -- for example, Unreal 3 or crysis -- despite being, largely, a collection of clever hacks of fairly pedestrian technology. Not to knock that, as that's largely what real-time graphics is -- but just because something looks better, doesn't necessarily mean they're pushing the boundaries in any new direction. For example, practically no one is working on, or at least talking about, truly multi-core renderers. Carmack's mega-texture, while simple in concept actually is a fairly substantial new technology that fundamentally changes what is possible in games, as well as having benefits for artist's work on the production side (which is perhaps its biggest feature, from a business perspective, given that budgets now skew towards art production so heavily.)

Another thing is the hardware side -- we've reached the point of "good enough" for lack of a better term. We'll always be happy to eat up more resources, of course, but we've reached a point where we can scale our solutions down to current low-end hardware with acceptable results. From another angle, look at each generation of console we've had. Is the difference between the NES and SNES more pronounced than say, the difference between the Xbox and Xbox 360? I think it is -- that is, the delta between console generations becomes less pronounced with each passing generation of hardware, and this also comes simultaneously with consumers' expectations of progress further obscuring technical progress -- oppinion is less often now "Wow! Its amazing they can do this now!" to "Finally! Its about damn time!"

I don't think Carmack is any less influentialor interesting today than he was 10 or 15 years ago.