Quake Live is growing fast! But this just the beginning

It’s been nearly 1,5 years since the Quake Live project was announced during the 2007 Quakecon event, and a lot has happened since that day.

The name Quake Zero changed to Quake Live due to a domain squatter, a closed beta was launched and a Quake Live tournament was held at Quakecon in 2008.

Today however it seems like Quake Live has reached a new milestone in it’s development.

More beta invites!

Only a good month ago the beta website changed it’s hosting location from the idsoftware.com domain to the permanent quakelive.com location.

Not much later Quake Live began what seemed like a huge expansion of the beta tester userbase. Suddenly you saw forum threads pop up everywhere with people asking for Quake Live beta invites. People started asking because they knew id software was handing them out more generously than ever before.

100,000 visits in January

What followed in January was a huge increase in visitors, probably doubling, tripling or even quadrupling the existing userbase.

Compete.com shows an increase in Quakelive.com visits from about 10,000 visits per month in December 2008 (20,000 on the old idsoftware.com domain), to nearly 100,000 visits per month in January 2009, of which about 35,000 are unique visitors.

But this is only the beginning…

Of course Quake Live has the ambition to reach a much broader audience than this. What we are seeing now is probably just the tip of the ice berg and if all goes well, we might just see Quake Live grow into something of epic proportions.

We’re not talking tens, but hundreds of thousands and possibly even over a million people playing Quake Live on a regular basis!

When comparing Quake Live to another free (yet established) browser game such as Runescape, it becomes clear that Quake Live has not yet begun to actually grow its userbase. While Quake Live generates nearly 100,000 visits per month, Runescape averages over 30 million visits in the same time.

This makes it clear that Quake Live still has the potential to grow in ways many probably did not even thought was possible. I predict some great times are still ahead of us, my fellow Quake fans!

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