Quake Live is an incredible first person arena shooter that has been Free-To-Play since 2015. The game itself is based on Quake 3 Team Arena, and has a huge following and competitive player base. The game itself has been free since it launch via its own portal/client that players could download from the Quake Live website. As a huge fan of anything Quake 3, I played the game from time to time as Quake 3 Team Arena was one of the few online games I ever got into thanks to its easy to learn, hard to master gameplay style.
For some time now the game has been available through Steam while retaining its Free-To-Play nature along with the likes of online shooters like Team Fortress 2. Players that booted up the game today noticed something very different, something that may in fact shatter everything that is Quake Live; the game has jumped in price from free to $10. Not only that, but all previous game data has been wiped clean. That means if you have played the game competitively since launch five-years ago, all the work you put in and your stats are completely gone. This wipe also includes all user names and clans that have been together for years.
As you can imagine, many players are in an uproar over this wipe to their years put into the game. If you have paid for a Pro subscription, your account was updated automatically which makes the sting even worse, as odds are you were one of the hardcore players of the game with years out into it. The Id development team has yet to make any statement regarding the sudden increase in price of the game, or why they decided to wipe the game clean.
The developers have stated that, “In addition to our new Steamworks features, this update is an accumulation of a year of code updates, optimizations, and over 4,500 map fixes,” the developers say.” They went on to state that, “We hope all players enjoy soaking in our new UI, in-game settings menus, speculating features, UTF-8 text chat, True Type Font support, Workshop, and our Stats API. We have had great pleasure working on this project over the past 8 years, and cannot wait to see what the community comes up with in the many years to come.”
It should be noted that there is also a lot of support for this change within the Quake Live community with many making it aware that the full game was never F2P for the Pro account. Although if you head over to the Quake Live Steam page you’ll find review after review railing against the change.
About Author
