Quake Live fans received an unpleasant surprise yesterday as the formerly free-to-play game was moved to Steam exclusively, and now costs $9.99 to play. An announcement posted after the update on the game’s Steam page yesterday explains:
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.
The announcement goes on to list the benefits of the update but, as you can imagine, many fans are not happy about this change. And that’s not the only thing that has them angry; apparently, years of user data was lost in the update as well. One user complained:
So my old user name is gone, my clans are gone, the match browser is absolutely useless, everything looks all ****ed up. You absolutely 100%, undeniably just destroyed THE greatest FPS ever created. It is completely ruined. You WILL be giving me my 10 dollars back. I guarantee you you will be giving me that money back. And I will be going back to Quake 3 now.
Another angry user who had apparently played Quake Live since beta claimed the update “purged, truncated, nullified the entire statistics, awards and progress we’ve earned during past 5 years.”
It’s understandable that long-time fans are so upset, given that the update apparently happened without any warning about either the price or the possibility that years of data would be lost.
What do you think about the new changes? Let us know in the comments!
