Quake Live - Development

Development

On August 3, 2007, at QuakeCon 2007, id Software publicly announced their plans to release a free browser based Quake 3 game titled Quake Zero. In early 2008, the title was officially renamed to Quake Live due to a domain squatting issue.

During late 2008 and early 2009, Quake Live was in an invitation-only closed beta. A handful of players were selected to begin the testing of the beta and were later allowed to invite a limited number of friends, whom, in turn, were permitted to send out invitations of their own. On February 24, 2009, the game progressed from closed beta to open beta, which caused an increased amount of traffic on the web server. Queues were organized to limit the stress and prevent the overloading of the servers. Within the first six hours after launch over 113,000 user accounts were created. The queues were removed after several days, and the servers were then upgraded to handle the larger volume of traffic.

Once Quake Live exited its closed beta stage, it was to be funded partially by in-game and website-based advertisements. IGA Worldwide were contracted by id Software to handle this aspect of the game's marketing. Problems with this model surfaced almost immediately with the announcement by the advertising agency that they were struggling as a result of the financial crisis of 2007–2010. In March 2009, the agency admitted that sale was a possibility if further investments were not forthcoming. With the acquisition of id Software by ZeniMax Media, the in-game and web-based advertisements for Quake Live changed noticeably, and began heavily advertising in-house for Bethesda Softworks products.

At QuakeCon 2009, John Carmack stated publicly that their financial scheme for the game had so far failed to provide sufficient income to keep the project in the black. As a result, he announced that a premium subscription service was being planned:

"The in-game advertising stuff has not been big business. That's not going to be able to carry the project... Quake Live is gonna be Quake Live for the foreseeable future... It's only just now that we're going to be able to put it to the test."

Marty Stratton, id Software's Executive Producer, has commented that:

"The plan is to completely integrate the ability to start and manage private games directly through QUAKE LIVE, utilizing all of the friends, awareness and notification features we have available through the site. This ability will be the cornerstone of a QUAKE LIVE Premium Service that will be offered for a small monthly fee (likely less than $5 per month)."

On August 6, 2010, the game left its public beta period, and "premium" and "pro" subscription options were announced. On September 11, 2012, id Software introduced subscriptions in one, three, six, and twelve month increments, along with the ability to purchase redeemable gift tokens.