Quake Live Goes Freemium

bethblog.com

12 points·fizz972··7 comments

>The Pro Subscription, which can be purchased for $3.99 per month, billed annually, includes all of the premium subscription features as well as:

The ability to start your own game server, specify a server location, determine the game mode and invite who you want to join you; [among other primarily social perks] [Premium is 1/2 the cost]

Ouch. $50/year for the capability to run my own server? Count me out.

Freemium is not a bad model. Users like it. It's not an excuse to charge more, however.

I think the bigger feature is the ability to invite non-paying members to the paid maps. It's nice to know that the option to run your own server exists, but I don't see it being that widely used. In any case, there are very few games I've played for an entire year, and for those few games I'd have been happy to pay more for the promise of continued support and more content.

I do believe that they're offering the ability to allocate resources on their servers.

I don't think that you have to pay, and then host a dedicated server.

Yes, this. Note that this is a pretty big price and hassle savings over renting your own server.

"With the Pro Subscription, you can invite three friends with Standard level memberships to play with you in any Premium level map" That's really good. It means that four friends could divvy up the cost of the suscription, and one of them could always invite whoever is available to the premium maps. As long as they always want to play toghether, wich is common among friends playing the same game, this seems like it would be quite easy, and even cheaper than the Premium Suscription.

I'd pay a premium for a age 30+ server. That would apply for most multiplayer games…

actual announcement:

http://www.quakelive.com/#news/site_news/22

Reply on news.ycombinator.com