Quake Live Coming to Steam

Today we are thrilled to announce that we are bringing Quake Live to Steam. Upon release, players will have the option of porting their Quake Live account to their Steam account, allowing you to play and update the game entirely through the Steam interface. We will also be supporting subscriptions through Steam, in 2 and 12 month increments, which can be paid with any payment method currently supported through Steam.

We still have a lot planned as we develop towards our Steam re-launch. First up for launch sometime this summer is a refresh of some of the site’s design elements. Users will be greeted by a new, simplified Welcome page. From here, you’ll be able to quickly get into a match through our new Play Now button, which will automatically find and connect to the best public server running out of a few selected gametypes. This makes getting into a game and playing super quick; we’ve found you can go from clicking on the game, to firing your weapon in under 20 seconds. No queues, no waiting, just fragging.

The match browser has received a few visual changes. We’ve merged down the two current browser designs into one new view that offers more info at a glance, and makes better use of the available space. We’ve completely removed the right column to allow more room for the browser, and the chat has moved into a collapsible tray.

Sometime after that we will launch an update that for the first time in Quake Live’s history, will bring about some big gameplay changes. We want to ensure that FPS fans who check out the game on Steam have more fun in their first match than the current gameplay systems allow. We’re not talking too much about specific changes yet, especially since the changes need to be taken as one whole package in order to be effective, but we will be iterating internally over the next few weeks to see what works.

We’re excited about the next few months of Quake Live’s future, and can’t wait until we start getting everything out into the players’ hands.