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For the last five years or so, Quake Live has been a free to play game. However, much to the community's surprise, that changed all of a sudden this week when a patch for the game wiped player stats, dropped subscriptions, switched to SteamWorks servers and gave the game a new $9.99/£6.99 price tag on Steam. As you might imagine, this change hasn't been welcomed by the community.
While a lot of people are annoyed by the fact that the game is suddenly pay to play, the addition of player information being completely erased certainly hasn't helped matters- especially since there was absolutely no warning prior to this happening. The game's store page has since been flooded with negative reviews.
Thanks to Quake Live's move over to Steamworks, player stats, friends lists, clans and usernames have been wiped. id Software only announced the change after it had already happened, with a post on Steam:
“Today marks a new beginning for Quake Live. Last year we expanded our platform to Steam, and today we have retired our old launcher and services in favor of integrating a robust array of Steamworks alternatives. We are now fully utilizing Steam for Friends, Chat, Lobbies, Voice Chat, Server Browser, Statistics, Achievements, Anti-cheat, Trading Cards, and Workshop.”
KitGuru Says: If id Software was planning such a massive change, they could have at least let the players know beforehand so they could be ready for it- especially since competitive information like statistics and leaderboards were completely wiped. Did any of you play Quake Live at all? What do you think of the recent changes?
Seriously, a little communication between developers and gamers isn’t much to ask. How do so many companies fail as such a basic thing? When you’re keeping rankings, you are providing as much as service as product.
If service is changing – which changes to rankings, MMR’s and such should count as – the playerbase deserves reasonable notice of those changes.
Less said about changing from F2P to paid the better.
I was playing since the beta and as of that I had a lot of achievements, some of them could only be acquired only through the beta phase, so I was somewhat proud of this account.
Since I didn’t merged my account with my steam profile (there was no warning or “move it or lose it” email) I have lost it all and now I’m asked to pay if I ever want to play again, without anything from my old account…
This is stupid and they deserve the worst for that move.