Quake Champions Drops Free-to-Play for $10 Price Tag

Quake Champions is no longer a free-to-play game.

That sentence would have seemed unthinkable a few years ago, when live service was the default model for almost every multiplayer shooter. But id Software's arena shooter is now removing the storefront, the battle passes and the currencies, and asking new players for a flat ten dollars instead. It is a quiet, unusual move, and it tells us a fair bit about where the game stands today.

A shooter that never quite caught on

If you had forgotten Quake Champions existed, you are not alone. The PvP arena shooter released in 2022 as a free-to-play title, and it never really became the phenomenon its pedigree suggested it might. Many players treated it as a passing curiosity: something to try for a weekend before moving on. Its concurrent player numbers on Steam reflect that, even though the game has shipped a remarkable 30 seasons of content.

Thirty seasons is a lot of content for a game that most people stopped talking about some time ago. And that is exactly what makes the new model so interesting.

What actually changes

The headline is simple: Quake Champions now has a price of ten bucks. In exchange, the monetization layer is gone entirely. That includes:

• All battle passes
• All microtransactions, including lockboxes
• The in-game currencies

In their place, every piece of content from all 30 seasons is available online, and players can pick any of the game's champions they like. No grinding, no unlocking, no paywalls between you and the roster.

Anyone who already played Quake Champions during its free-to-play days is not being asked to pay. Existing players can carry on at no additional cost, and all account progress will be kept. Those who spent real money on in-game currencies will get refunds.

Steam only, and a deadline to watch

There is an important caveat. The change applies specifically to the Steam version of the game. The Microsoft Store version has been "retired."

Players who used the Microsoft Store version aren't being left out in the cold, though. If their Bethesda account is linked to Steam, they can claim the Steam version for free. Those who haven't linked the two accounts yet still have time, but not much: the window closes on October 7th. If that applies to you, it is worth sorting out sooner rather than later.

A last gasp, not a revival

On paper, this is good news for anyone who enjoys the game. A one-off price, all content included and no pressure to buy anything is about as player-friendly as it gets.

But the timing suggests a less cheerful reading. Microsoft carried out layoffs earlier this year that hit both id Software and Bethesda. Stripping out every live service system looks less like a bold new strategy and more like the game being moved into maintenance mode – that is, kept running, but no longer actively expanded. Quake Champions is dropping its live service ambitions, and this may well be its final chapter before whatever comes next for the series.

Our Take

For readers who love arena shooters, this is arguably the best version of Quake Champions there has ever been, even if it arrives under gloomy circumstances. Every champion, every season, no lockboxes: for a small one-off fee, that is a strong offer for a genre that has struggled for attention for years.

The bigger picture is harder to ignore. The shift suggests that free-to-play monetization only makes sense while a studio is actively feeding a game with new seasons. Once that work stops, keeping a store and a battle pass running looks pointless, and a cheap box price becomes a tidy way to wind things down without switching the servers off.

It is worth watching whether other struggling live service shooters follow a similar path rather than shutting down outright. And for Quake fans specifically, the real question is what id Software does with the series from here, and whether this is the last we hear of Quake Champions for a while.