Quake Champions Is Ditching Free-to-Play After 8 Years — Now Costs $9.99 and Development Is Over

Key Takeaways

• Quake Champions has officially transitioned from free-to-play to a paid game priced at £8.99 / $9.99.
• The game is now Steam-exclusive — the Microsoft Store version has been shut down entirely.
• Patch 1.31 removes all microtransactions, battle passes, loot boxes, paid currencies, and the in-game store.
• All Champions and most cosmetics are now unlocked for everyone included in the base purchase.
• id Software has confirmed no future content updates are planned — this is essentially the game’s final form.
• If you’ve played Quake Champions on Steam before, you get the updated version for free.
• Microsoft Store players have until 7th October to link accounts and claim a Steam copy.
• Platinum purchased within 60 days before 23rd September will be refunded automatically.

Quake Champions Just Pulled Off a Wild Business Model Switch

Eight years. That’s how long Quake Champions spent as a free-to-play game, slowly grinding through seasons, battle passes, and all the live-service mechanics that come with that model. Now, in a move that almost never happens in gaming, id Software has flipped the whole thing on its head — Quake Champions is now a paid game, and everything that made it free-to-play is gone.

The new price is £8.99 / $9.99, which is honestly not bad considering what you’re getting. Patch 1.31 — which kicks off this new chapter — strips out the battle passes, the in-game store, all paid currencies, loot boxes, and login rewards in one clean sweep. What’s left is a leaner, no-nonsense arena shooter where every Champion is unlocked from the start and most cosmetics are available to everyone out of the box.

It’s the kind of thing the community has been asking for for years. The irony is that it’s only happening because the game is essentially done.

No More New Content — This Is the Final Version

There’s a catch, and it’s a pretty significant one. id Software has confirmed on the Steam news page that no additional content updates are planned. This isn’t a relaunch or a new era for Quake Champions — it’s a farewell package. The game is being preserved in what id considers its most complete and accessible form, and then it’s being left alone.

That’s a bittersweet reality for a game that launched in paid early access back in 2017, went fully free-to-play in 2018, and only officially exited early access in 2022. Quake Champions never quite found the massive audience id Software was hoping for. On Steam, it peaked at around 17,476 concurrent players at launch — already a modest number for a franchise with Quake’s legacy. In recent times, that number had dropped to roughly 600 daily players, which is basically a ghost town for a multiplayer-only game.

It never came to consoles either, which closed off a chunk of the potential audience that might have discovered it through a platform like PlayStation or Nintendo. A console port was discussed early on but never materialised, and at this point obviously never will.

What Patch 1.31 Actually Changes

Beyond the pricing shift, patch 1.31 is doing some real tidying up under the hood. The UI has been reorganised to remove all the free-to-play tabs and menus that used to clutter the main experience — things like the battle pass tracker, the shop, and the currency counters. Character customisation has been bumped up to a more prominent spot on the main menu, which makes sense given that cosmetics are now freely available rather than locked behind purchases or grind.

The result is a version of Quake Champions that actually feels like a complete, finished product rather than an ongoing service that requires constant attention. You buy it, you download it, you have everything. That’s a surprisingly rare thing for a live-service game to become.

Already Own It on Steam? You’re Good

If you’ve previously played Quake Champions on Steam, you’re not paying anything. The updated version is being handed to all existing Steam players for free, which is a clean and fair way to handle the transition. Your library already includes it — it’ll just update to the 1.31 version automatically.

For anyone who purchased Platinum (the game’s premium currency) within 60 days before 23rd September, a refund is being issued. Rockstar and id clearly don’t want players to feel like they got burned for spending money on a currency that no longer exists in the game.

Microsoft Store Players Need to Act Fast

The messier situation is for players who were on the Microsoft Store / Xbox on PC version, which is being killed off entirely. Here’s how it works depending on your situation:

If you played on the Microsoft Store before 23rd September and your Bethesda and Steam accounts are already linked, you should receive a Steam copy of Quake Champions within 48 hours automatically — no action needed beyond that.

If your accounts weren’t linked, or you didn’t have a Steam account yet, you’ll need to create a Steam account, sign into your Bethesda account, and link the two together via the Bethesda linked accounts page. Once that’s done, your Steam copy should show up within 48 hours as confirmed by Bethesda’s Slayers Club announcement.

The critical thing here is the deadline: you only have until 7th October to do this. After that date, the window closes and you lose the chance to claim your Steam copy. If you’ve got any friends who were on the Microsoft Store version and might not have seen the news, now would be a good time to pass it along.

The Quiet End of a Live-Service Experiment

Looking back at the full arc of Quake Champions, it’s a familiar story in modern gaming. A beloved classic franchise gets a live-service multiplayer spin-off, struggles to compete with established juggernauts, slowly loses its player base despite consistent content updates, and eventually reaches a point where the economics just don’t work anymore.

id Software at least deserves credit for how they’ve handled the wind-down. Rather than pulling the plug entirely and leaving players with nothing, they’ve stripped the game down to something genuinely worth the $9.99 asking price — a complete roster, most cosmetics, no ongoing costs, and 30 seasons’ worth of content already baked in. For the 600 or so daily players still showing up to frag each other, this is probably the best-case scenario for a game in decline. And compared to some of the brutal studio restructurings happening across the industry right now — including what we covered with Double Fine’s separation from Xbox — a peaceful preservation mode is a relatively kind ending.

The $9.99 / £8.99 price point also makes it genuinely easy to recommend to lapsed Quake fans or anyone who missed it the first time. Arena shooters are a niche genre these days, but the people who love them really love them, and Quake Champions in its current form — fully unlocked, no monetisation, just straight arena shooting — is probably the most honest version of the game that has ever existed. Whether enough new players discover it at this late stage to keep the servers populated is a different question entirely.

For now though, the game that once peaked at nearly 18,000 concurrent players is settling into its retirement. Not with a bang, but with a $9.99 price tag and a clean interface. There are worse ways to go. If you’re looking for other gaming news making waves right now, check out Rockstar’s wildly expensive GTA 6 Goodtime State merchandise bundle and our GTA 6 November launch coverage for everything you need to know before the biggest game release of 2026.