Quake Live migrated to Steamworks, no more free-to-play option

Quake Live is no longer free-to-play, but it has a ton of new features.

Quake Live has been migrated over to Steamworks with a major update, dropping support for the stand-alone launcher the shooter debuted with in August 2010.

According to a Steam Community post, migrating to Steamworks has enabled Steam Friends, Chat, Lobbies, Voice Chat, Server Browser, Statistics, Achievements, Anti-cheat, Trading Cards and Workshop integration.

The update also delivers "an accumulation of a year of code updates, optimizations, and over 4,500 map fixes".

For example: multiplayer servers have been overhauled. Id Software has distributed files through Steam Tools to allow users to spawn dedicated servers, but supports listen servers for online, LAN, and local bot-match play as well as player lobbies to keep groups together. Players can define unique rulesets called Factories, and define map pools of modes and Factories to curate their play experience.

The update removes Quake Live's subscription services in favour of a flat $10 price tag. Unfortunately that also means there's no free-to-play option.

"We hope all players enjoy soaking in our new UI, in-game settings menus, spectating features, UTF-8 text chat, True Type Font support, Workshop, and our Stats API," Id said.

"We have had great pleasure working on this project over the past 8 years, and cannot wait to see what the community comes up with in the many years to come."

Now for the bad part: all player statistics have been wiped. Yep. Quake Live players have lost their friends lists, clans and all statistics. You can imagine how that's going down - or if you can't, just browse the Steam forums.