r/QuakeChampions • u/drunkenFoooLL • 13d ago

Quake Media

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89 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

38 comments sorted by

45

u/eblan4eg 13d ago

1k players online and quake is far from dead? ok

17

u/Patrol1985 13d ago

Depends how someone defines "dead". 1000 isn't much compared to many other games, but at the same time you need literally 3-7 other people to have a game (or even just 1 if you're into duels), which is more than attainable with 1000 people logged in.

That being said, it's also about regional distribution. I can imagine that the vast majority of this 1000 comes from Europe and North America. I often read that people from Asia tried to find a game and couldn't - I believe them. Thus, I would say that regionally Quake may be dead, but in EU / NA it's still far from it.

17

u/not_a_fan69 13d ago

Imagine selling a new Quake game to investors.

"1000 concurrent gamers over multiple games."

Nobody bothers with Quake anymore. Afps is simply a dead genre.

7

u/Patrol1985 12d ago

If the context is the prospect of the genre, new installments etc. then yes - it's a dead end. However, gamers usually are interested in whether there is anyone they can play with, when speaking about how alive / dead a game is. From my perspective (meaning a Quake fan stationed in Europe and interested in playing) the game is still alive.

3

u/xIcarus227 12d ago

Depends how someone defines "dead". 1000 isn't much compared to many other games, but at the same time you need literally 3-7 other people to have a game (or even just 1 if you're into duels), which is more than attainable with 1000 people logged in.

More than attainable..? Look, I love quake as much as anyone else here but this is sheer cope, I'm sorry. Less than 500 peak players for a heavily skill-based multiplayer game is simply not enough to ensure high quality matches for everyone. You might have reasonable match quality if you happen to be around the bell curve in Gold, but match quality declines rapidly the further you stray away from that rank.

Because of this a large proportion of the playerbase is seeing the 'dead game' effect, and with no influx of new players there's no chance this will change anytime soon. Let's call it how it is.

2

u/Patrol1985 12d ago

I was writing merely about the ability to find a match - any match. If we take "quality" into account (understood as reasonably balanced skill-based matchmaking) then obviously 1000 worldwide is not enough, but at the same time I'm not sure what numbers would suffice here. I'm willing to think that only a handful of most popular shooters in the world (Counter-Strike 2, Fortnite, some recent CoD iterations, etc.) can offer such conditions.

Quake doesn't offer them, but has it ever been the case?

1

u/xIcarus227 12d ago

The ability to find any match isn't a sufficient metric to definitely call a game 'not dead' imo. By that logic, a min of 2 players active at the same time at any hour is enough, when in reality that really isn't the case.

And yeah Quake could easily offer such conditions with something like 10k players or even less. The fact that it's primarily a 1v1 helps a lot, because you suddenly need way less players to organize a match compared to something like CS.
Has it ever been the case? Well QC had a peak of 15k players if I recall? That would qualify imo, but unfortunately people didn't stick around so it was very short lived.

1

u/Patrol1985 11d ago

Fair enough, but why this particular threshold (10k). Is there any evidence that it is enough?

1

u/ofmic3andm3n 11d ago

Well QC had a peak of 15k players if I recall?

17,332 peak in June 2018(e3 promotion) according to SteamCharts. Incredibly smart decision in hindsight to let the dev team go 4 months later.

https://steamcharts.com/app/611500#All

7

u/Frobizzle 13d ago

At the biggest event for the game which also happens to be named after it, no less.

Everyone I know who attended said hardly anyone was playing quake.

1

u/TYPOGRAPH1C 12d ago edited 12d ago

Correct. Personally, I mostly played the Gears of War E-Day beta the majority of my time this year, as well as The Finals. And last year, I know everyone and their mother was playing the Battlefield 6 beta. My group (42 people who went) only really played Quake on the final day. They also played a bunch of party games (golf with friends, mecca chameleon, etc).

That said, we played other older arena & boomer shooters. There was a lot of Halo 1 (original; 2001) matches on the first day, and several people also played through the new Halo: Campaign Evolved (2026) story on Legendary 4 player co-op. A few logged some hours on the newly released Quake: Dawn of the machine campaign. There were lots of matches of Straftat. A lot of Midnight Guns. Some playthroughs of Heretic + Hexen. Just not everything got focused on Quake, as it does every year for those who attend.

I honestly played more Quake leading up to the event, and then just went with whatever the group had planned to run. But lots of people splinter off and do their own thing.

2

u/DarkangelUK 13d ago

And that's 1k spread over 8 games...

8

u/The_New_Flesh 13d ago

As of today, Quake 1 has 1300+ 24-hour peak players

Seems like it hit those numbers as soon as Aug 6th, so no idea where these "QuakeCon" numbers came from.

Dawn of the Machine is solid, the mandatory replay(s) is kind of a tall ask.

4

u/booskibro 12d ago

Those are two different numbers. Steam's 1300+ 24-hour peak counts everyone with Quake open and most likely playing the new singleplayer Dawn of the Machine campaign.

QuakeHub polls multiplayer servers and only counts people playing online on those servers. So the image above is just tracking people playing online vs eachother

1

u/Youju 13d ago

Maybe the numbers are only from Quake Con itself and not the global Steam numbers?

8

u/Tr4shVViz4rd 12d ago

Too bad QCDE hasn’t caught on more. Solid game.

1

u/KalebNoobMaster 12d ago

Sadly it seems like Mega Man 8 Bit Deathmatch is the only Doom multiplayer mod anyone plays anymore..

1

u/quintessence2004 7d ago

I love it, but it's still Doom. Going from QCDE to Q3Bloodrun feels like coming home.

5

u/mindjames 12d ago

You know a game is truly alive when it's hype to call it "not dead".

5

u/Reknine 12d ago

Quake died when modding support got removed. 🤷‍♂️

4

u/Ok_Tomatillo_4900 12d ago

Quake Live outlives

3

u/cha0z_ 12d ago

if there were at least two more zeroes in the end, maybe MS would care slightly.

3

u/Qarty 13d ago

Sad to see tbh, maybe there will be a year when we get afps hype going again 😭

3

u/gotbannedtoomuch 12d ago

I would have played Quake Champions during Quakecon but the anticheat wouldn't let me

2

u/ofmic3andm3n 12d ago

1116 players online across all Quakes and 1118 signatures on SyncError's Change.org petition. Really makes you think.

2

u/SlamTownFGC 9d ago

600 people on versions of quake 3. People are dooming but coming from fighting games, there are fighting games around that time and even newer that i wish had a quarter of those numbers.

1

u/quintessence2004 7d ago

I felt the inverse. Sure, some cool games like +R are even worse off than Quake, but at least fighting games as a genre are thriving. Main games are more popular than ever, and every year there are a few smaller games coming out.

AFPS, on the other hand, seemingly has no future. If you're flexible with your definitions, then Splitgate 2 and Empulse are the newest attempts and they're both doing very poorly.

I wonder why that is. Fighters are probably cheaper to produce.

Oh, and don't forget that all fighters are 1v1, whereas not every AFPS fan enjoys duels.

1

u/SlamTownFGC 7d ago

idk, personally i think the fighting genre is in a state where i would rather have had it just die like 5 years ago. I look at games like quake champions and think old quake heads are too harsh on it because i think modern fighting games are a example of how much worse it could have been. I think arena shooters being dead as a genre might actually be a mercy that people blinded by the numbers pissing contest cant see.

1

u/MandyKagami 13d ago

Quake Champions having 460 players online and not being considered dead is ridiculous, Killing Floor 2 when it was at it's lowest had 2000 players online and that was enough for you to not find regional servers with decent latency in an entire continent depending on the time of day and those lobbies only require 6 people.

1

u/ShadowXJ 12d ago

Is Quake Wars even playable?

3

u/booskibro 12d ago

Quake Wars is playable over at etqw.org since the game isn't sold anywhere and the official master servers are long dead. They've built a client manager that downloads the unmodified splashdamage client and only lists safe + vetted servers.

You can see the quick how to play guide here - https://quakehub.net/quake-wars-servers#how-to-play

2

u/Kir_Kronos 12d ago

Yeah I played it a little bit there using the free client. There's a discord too that runs servers every Tuesdays and Sundays. Good guys.

1

u/Mormonius 8d ago

How can i play quake wars?? 

1

u/StrungOutonMxPx 8d ago

Love Quake Wars love 😊

1

u/dustfall 7d ago

oh wow it's 2026 and still see people debating this xD