Quake Champions will be free-to-play, but there’s some fine print

The business model of Quake Champions has been revealed by Creative director Tim Willits in an interview with Polygon. The arena shooter is going to be free-to-play, but there's a catch – players will only have access to a single character, a Champion named Ranger, for free, or they can purchase the Champion Pack and have access to all the Champions for a fixed price (you're buying the full game, in fact). All players will share the same maps and modes, it's just the way that they access Champions that differ.

“At its core, it’s a free-to-play game,” Willits said, “with the option to buy the Champion Pack and just get in and play with all the Champions. There are a number of Quake players that just want to play their Quake, right? And they are familiar with the business model of our previous games, and they are totally fine. ‘I want to buy the game. I want to start playing. I want to have access to all the Champions.’

“But then we also understand that we want to get as many people into the game as possible, especially outside of North America and Western Europe, where we have a massive fan base. So we want to have the flexibility to have a free-to-play option for those people.”

While those who play Quake Champions for free only have access to the Ranger, they can earn in-game currency called favor and play other Champions for a limited time. The duration of this “rent” (which is what it is, despite Willits' unwillingness to use the word) is still under wraps, but it seems that favor will be easy to earn.

So, it's great that Quake Champions allows everyone access to its core content and the free-to-play mode is clearly more than a glorified trial, as you have access to all the maps and content with no time limit, apart from the aforementioned Champions. Would we change something? Definitely: either give free players a choice between two or three Champions or add a Champion rotation system, otherwise we're pretty sure Quake Champions is going to be a Ranger fest and people are going to be pissed about it.

What do you think of Quake Champions' business model?