Quake Live Out of Beta, Adds Pay Tiers

Quake Live, id Software’s experiment in ad supported, browser based gaming is now out of beta, complete with some pretty significant changes. The most notable of these being pay tiers for what was  a completely free to play game. The main game will still be free to play, but the Premium and Pro subscription levels, costing $1.99 and $3.99 per month respectively (billed annually), will add many features exclusive to Quake fans willing to fork over a few bucks.

The Premium tier will add access to 20 new maps at launch with more promised to follow. The maps are a combination of new maps and fan requests from previous Quake games, like Aerowalk, Theater of Pain, Japanese Castles and Realm of Steel Rats. Other features include the all new Freeze Tag game mode, the option to create your own clan or join up to five total and storing your match statistics for six months.

The Pro tier includes the Premium level features, plus some extras, most importantly the option to run private servers. Pro players can also invite up to three players with free accounts into games featuring the premium tier maps. They also have the option of joining up to ten clans and their match stats will be stored for a full year. The free version is still available, including access to the standard maps and the ability to join one clan.

It looks like the ad supported model hasn’t panned out quite like id hoped, but at least they have found a reasonable way to keep the game running for the more casual players. All the while giving the more serious fans some of the features they’ve been asking for. For a price of course.

I’m curious to see how this will go over with the fans at Quakecon next week. Speaking of which, look out for my coverage from Dallas all next weekend. Anyone else here going?