Quake Champions ditches free-to-play and live service for a clean $10 price tag

Quake Champions is no longer a free-to-play live-service game. id Software and Bethesda have stripped out the entire monetization layer and relaunched it on Steam as a flat $10 purchase — and if you already owned it, the new version appears in your library for free.

The patch removes the Battle Pass, weekly and event challenges, the store, Platinum and Shard currencies, loot boxes, daily login rewards, and the Champion Progression shard reward path. All champions are now unlocked from the start, and most cosmetic content has been made available to every player. The official update notes that no additional content updates are planned, and that recently purchased premium currency will be refunded — though players who spent money on skins over the years will find that everyone else now gets those same items at no extra cost.

Quake Champions launched in early access back in 2017 as id Software's attempt to bring the classic arena shooter formula into the live-service era. It never quite broke through to a mainstream audience, but a dedicated community of a few hundred players kept it alive through years of mostly cosmetic updates. The game's free-to-play structure always sat awkwardly alongside its old-school, twitch-reflex gameplay — the kind of arena shooter that peaked with Quake III Arena and Unreal Tournament, genres that historically thrived on simple, one-time purchases rather than battle passes and storefronts.

The classic skins for Quake Ranger and Doom Slayer are now included by default, which is a nice touch for longtime fans. It's a cleaner exit from the live-service experiment than many expected — and with the clutter gone, the game is arguably in its best shape since launch.