14 DAY TRIAL // Gaming has seen a lot of things appear and disappear over the time, but one trend that is certainly here to stay is free browser-based video games. Even though the market was filled with Java or Flash-based minigames that only offered a pretty reasonable experience for casual players, id Software, the company behind the very successful Quake and Doom franchises has changed the whole market when it launched Quake Live.
For those of you who don't know, Quake Live allows you to play the historical game right from a browser window for free, with the profit being generated by ads that are displayed during the waiting times or when people view statistics. It is currently in open beta stage and has seen a massive number of fans connect to test out the application.
The success was so huge, that id is now considering giving the same treatment to other IPs in its portfolio, like Wolfenstein Enemy Territory, at least according to co-founder and CEO Todd Hollenshead. He talked with Kotaku and shared a few things about the success of the game.
“The participation in the open beta is 50 percent higher than what we expected,” he said, thus explaining the huge waiting times that players had to endure in order to finally connect to a server. He then revealed that the team wasn't even confident that people would be interested, as Quake III Arena, on which the new browser game is based was popular but not that much. “We didn't know, I had my concerns. Are people going to show up?”
But the 110,000 new accounts set up in the first six hours after the game launched convinced the team that the right decision had been made. “There was an enormous response on day one. We were impressed with it.” So big was the reaction that other titles might have the same fate as Quake Live, “Probably, the next thing would be Wolfenstein Enemy Territory. I think that box games are going to go the way of the buggy whip.”
So, if everything goes smoothly with this title, new things will come and id might specialize in browser-based games. Until fresh titles are confirmed, we can enjoy Quake Live.