Quake Live Goes Gold

On the 6th of August, Syncerror of id Software declared that Quake Live, id's browser-based free-to-play dueling game, is now officially out of beta. With the addition of long awaited features like premium accounts, new maps, additional game modes, and others, the game is looking better than ever. While it is still free to play for anyone, the premium service gives users special features, such as private servers, extra maps, etc.

I've played a great deal of Quake Live in the past, mostly in Beta, and it's a fantastic piece of work. Being able to simply jump in a game of Quake anytime you want is a super-nice feature.

That said, I'm not a big fan of their subscription model. Not that I'm against paying for it but they seem to have done a few very curious things:

1. Prevented free players from playing all the latest maps. That's my freeloader self talking, all those fucking awesome new maps like aeroq3 and that clan arena map from ra3map11 and I can't play them unless I pay for a subscription. But I'm a man of my word and I believe in compensating companies for content except...
2. You can only pay for a year at a time. This is truly bizarre. $1.99 or $3.99 doesn't seem like a lot, but it adds up to about $25 and $48 bucks a year. By making you pay for a year up front, it puts the yearly cost of playing Quake Live very plainly in front of the user, instead of coaxing the user nicely into a "Oh, just pay ten bucks and you get everything for a few months!" charge on their credit card that users will invariably forget about. I can understand if credit card charges might prevent month-to-month payments, but not allowing some...say... $10 for 3 months option is bad business in my opinion. On top of that...
3. They're going with a monthly fee for blanket access. I think that something along the lines of micro-transactions would have fared a lot better, allowing people to pay $10 for 100 "quake points" that you can then spend on a model or a skin, or for the ability to use colors in their nickname. Stupid, inconsequential shit, but as a general rule people WILL pay for the right to use stupid inconsequential shit.

Still, I throughly enjoyed the time I spent playing Quake Live and I wish SyncError and the rest of the QL team luck, and hopefully now that the game is out of beta we will start to see some more consistent advertising for it. Who knows, I might even pop in for an odd game now and then.

And those of us who bought quake3 back in 1999, what do we get?

Use3D said:

And those of us who bought quake3 back in 1999, what do we get?

Mods.

I am a Premium, btw.

THEY CHANGED IT NOW IT SUX!

Seriously the Japan servers literally died since they introduced the changes :-(

Use3D said:

And those of us who bought quake3 back in 1999, what do we get?

The same game you bought in 1999. This is a new game.

Well, almost. Quake Live, in spite of being based on Q3A, has had a ton of extra effort put into it. It runs in the browser after a 5 minute download, there is no financial commitment (for the free version), there are tons of engine improvements that were previously limited to mods, there's friends lists, there's global stats tracking, there's a built-in training mode, there's server spawning for premium members (which is MUCH cheaper than even the cheapest VPS), the list goes on.

It's also worth mentioning that the ad-supported game has every map from Q3A, most maps worth a damn from Team Arena, one of the dreamcast maps, ztn, and a few new ones by id, so other than the fact that you can't run mods and user-made maps it's not like you're paying for content you already paid for.

What you're essentially paying for, either with money or with your eyeballs looking at their advertisements, is Q3A's second wind. Even back in 2005-2006 when I first started playing Q3A (I only got a computer capable of running it in 2004), it never had as many players as it does now.

Anyway, I love quake live. I'd pay if I had more time.

Use3D said:

And those of us who bought quake3 back in 1999, what do we get?

Mod support and the engine source code. Live is a closed garden content-wise.

Quake Live is pretty cool. I'm pretty blown away that a browser based game can be so in depth.

AlexMax said:

That said, I'm not a big fan of their subscription model. Not that I'm against paying for it but they seem to have done a few very curious things:

I pretty much agree with you there. Simply by making the payment monthly thye could suade over some people to do it since the charge would be so small that it would hardly matter to most any user.

Fusion said:

I'm pretty blown away that a browser based game can be so in depth.

The client install is a custom browser plugin that hosts the game. It's not like it's running on Flash/Silverlight/HTML5 or anything. You could do the same hack using Rage and claim it was a "browser based game."

If it was that simple, I'm sure they'd be supporting Opera, Crome etc as well.

I remember an interview where they said it will run in Crome. But that it wasn't working properly. So currently they don't allow it being used with it.

kristus said:
I pretty much agree with you there. Simply by making the payment monthly thye could suade over some people to do it since the charge would be so small that it would hardly matter to most any user.

They may have considered a month too little to build commitment to the game in enough people to be cost effective, but a year does seem like too much, especially when many can only play during certain periods of the year. With a biannual or quarterly subscription they could make it more attractive for people who concentrate their playing around their vacations or during the less busy moments (and not when the college exams and such are coming).

I play the game on and off, so me paying the full 50 right now would be a waste of money, considering I don't have a job right now. I do like how we can at least practice the new maps rather than having them be completely exclusive. Honestly, my only real complaint is the fact that there are ads before each match. Was that really necessary?

Pizzabob: You could go premium too. That's half the price. And the ads before the matches are gone for premium and pro.

Myk: Well, that would be viable options too. Wouldn't hurt to have choices. Personally I wouldn't mind having it automatically pull the money from my account every month at the 25th (pay day).

kristus said:

If it was that simple, I'm sure they'd be supporting Opera, Crome etc as well.

I remember an interview where they said it will run in Crome. But that it wasn't working properly. So currently they don't allow it being used with it.

Works for me fine, using chrome. When did they say this?

Maybe they changed that recently then (like when they went out of Beta), since last I tried with Crome it said it only supported IE and FF. And they said that in an interview last or second last Quakecon or something.

Edward850 said:

Works for me fine, using chrome. When did they say this?

It's giving me an error, and there is no sign of the Chrome logo in the supported browsers list.

Interestingly enough I just tried logging in and playing a game with chrome and it worked.

I have FireFox dedicated for QuakeLive mainly.

kristus said:

If it was that simple, I'm sure they'd be supporting Opera, Crome etc as well.

It is that simple, and they apparently don't care about Opera. Back in the day there were all kinds of proprietary browser plugins, but today it's mainly just Flash. That doesn't mean that plugin frameworks have suddenly stopped working.

EDIT: Some more discussion on why it's not interesting in a technical sense.

bla bla bla, it's not actually browser based bla bla bla bla


Who cares, it is fun, and you can play it by going to the website kewl, now play or GTFO k

Use3D said:

And those of us who bought quake3 back in 1999, what do we get?

It's sunk cost, nobody cares.