Anyone anticipating something new from id Software might find their next title to be a little surprising. It isn't a flashy first-person shooter that requiring upgrades of several hardware components to see it in all its graphical glory. Instead, it's Quake Live , a free-to-play remake of Quake III Arena , a title almost 10 years old. This new version will feature slightly updated graphics and a few other tweaks, but the biggest difference is it'll be launched from a web browser and feature in-game advertising.

Currently the game's still in a closed beta testing phase though that should soon change. According to id co-founder John Carmack (DOOM, Wolfenstein 3D, Quake), the title represents a departure and risk for the company. In an interview with IGN, Carmack expanded on id's philosophy behind bringing Quake Live to the public."When we had made the decision at id Software to start growing into a multi-team company whereas historically we had always been one project at a time, one of my other thoughts on this project was that we'd be able to take a small team and start this less demanding project rather than start off with immediately another triple-A title that needs 50 to 80 people or whatever. A small team could be used on this and grow a kernel that if necessary we could build a larger team around and what happens with that is going to depend a lot on the commercial success of this. If Quake Live is a good success then it's going to be one of those service model businesses where an active team stays on it forever as long as it's generating any revenue. If it turns out that we called it wrong and there is no business case here then we'll have a tested team that we can add more people around to do a more conventional project. We do have high hopes that this can turn out to be a good business model for us."Carmack continued on to expand on the potential risks of developing a game like this. "There certainly is the worry about the old tale about the pioneers, the one with all the arrows in his back and the people that come afterward and see all the pitfalls to avoid. We do think that it's at least plausible, there are a lot of online services obviously that are doing well with whatever media types that they're presenting. There are a lot of free games that are doing quite well and some very impressive numbers in the casual gaming market. [Quake Live] is obviously not a Flash game or a Java game, it was a state of the art game previously and it has the full features of the development house behind it, but it's an interesting question and we'll find out hopefully within six months or so the verdict will be in from the jury about whether this is something that works out or not, but I can't say that we've got a lot of things to look at. In fact I would assume a whole lot of people would be looking at what we're doing."While the game's free-to-play, it will feature in-game advertisements. id Software Executive Producer Marty Stratton was also in on the interview and provided some insight into how the advertising system will work. "With the game being completely delivered and the interface being in a web browser we have all of the tools you would normally have to deliver ad content through the web browser and our advantage and where we're really trying to tie those pieces together is in how we link those together for advertisers. Running promotions on the site that get people to maybe use a sponsored game character, game skin within a game playing for leaderboards where they win something from the advertiser or unlock something that's advertiser-produced. And that's something that advertisers are interested in. They've got their media buys, they've got their web buys, this is a way for them to interact with what we hope is an incredibly large group of consumers in a way that is far more interactive and allows for a greater conversation than just 'there's a web ad.'"Carmack jumped in after Stratton to give his own perspective on the subject. "It's worth noting that I've never been a big supporter of in-game advertising in conventional games because I definitely do feel that if you're playing 50 to 60 bucks for a game, throwing advertising in on top of it is…there's a justifiable reason for some people to be upset about that. Quake Arena was always much more of a sporting arena combat sort of thing where integrating advertising directly into the game doesn't even feel like a tacky bolt-on. In fact what we've done with Quake Live is all of the original levels have been passed over and brought up to a modern level of polish where eight or nine years ago when Quake Arena would have been out, the state of the industry accepted a lot of things like mismatched texture seams and things that just weren't quite up to the level of attention to detail that we follow now. All the levels have had a pass through them bringing the attention to detail to modern standards without changing anything fundamentally in the graphics engine, just touching up all the data. They've also then been modified so that all the levels have billboard type things in them which are nicely integrated with spotlight lighting and so on in there where we can stream in-game ads as well as of course things that happen on the scoreboard and when you die and so on. It's a perfect fit for this type of thing because it's not a matter of taking some game we just happened to have around and throwing up ads that you can't skip in between every level or something like that, it fits well with the original tone of the game."We asked whether there'll be any sort of pricing tier that allows players to turn the ads off. "No, there's no current plan for that. Not to say it couldn't happen depending on how the market bears out on it. Actually, turning the ads off right now would make the whole thing look worse. They really are integrated in such a way that they're not obtrusive, you're not waiting for any of the ads. It's not like stuff on website where it's like 'watch this ad' or subscribe or whatever like that where you're actively frustrated with it. "Stratton described a few issues that might occur if users were able to shut off ads. "If we have an advertiser that wants to sponsor a leaderboard over a four week period and on a weekly basis we award prizes or some unlock or some cool content…because somebody has chosen to opt out of advertising do we then not allow them to see that leaderboard? Or if an advertiser reskins a character to be like team whatever the advertiser's name is, and it's a really cool skin that a lot of people would like, and we put a picture of that up on the front page and say 'new skin available, check it out here, brought to you by so and so,' is that an ad? Is that great additional content that players will dig?"