During his QuakeCon address, id Software founder John Carmack stated that the current in-game advertising model is not enough to support the game in the future.
This followed the announcement that Quake Live will be playable on both Mac and Linux platforms as of next Tuesday.
Carmack then went on to explain the upcoming feature of optional premium accounts, which would help carry the project as it grows.
Players with these premium accounts can configure and run their own private servers for Quake Live, but it comes at the cost of a small monthly fee. This has been frequently requested feature, especially by the more hardcore community.
Charging a small fee for the option of hosting a private server seems like a great idea, because it will enable clans to play Quake Live more seriously and this will in turn generate more interest for the game. And of course money for id Software as well, which should allow them to continue releasing free upgrades as they have done in the past.
But if you’re not interested in private servers, competitive play and paying to play Quake Live then there’s nothing to worry about. During his keynote speech, Carmack once more stated that Quake Live will never go entirely pay-to-play.
Judging by these new developments and Carmacks wording during his talk, I would say that we can expect further paid services to be added in the future. Perhaps they’ll target the casual crowd next with outfit customization, or maybe they’ll offer LAN play features at a small fee, which is quite possibly the most requested feature of all.
Quake Live is an excellent - free - first person shooter
The failure of id’s ad-model for Quake Live should not come as any great surprise to fervent Quake Live players. I’ve even played a couple of hours today and never saw any advertising, only the default Quake Live logo’s that take their place in the arena’s.
It would appear that id Software may have had some trouble gathering sufficient advertisers to support the game, and the ad-model might have worked well had they been able to convince more external parties to join in.
I hope these premium subscriptions will help Quake Live take off as a competitive game. Now it sees a couple of competitions every month, but there isn’t any big clan scene like there used to be for shooters of this sort.
I think the blame for this lies solely on the lack of private servers. This new feature should help clans practice more comfortably and arrange matches more easily, which could make Quake Live a major contender on online competition sites such as ClanBase and ESL-Europe.
Who knows, I may even go for one such account myself if I find the time to run a clan again…
How about you? Do you care for hosting private servers? Or would you rather keep playing for free?
(source: Shacknews)
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