I was talking with some guys on qlrankstv chat about why Quake fell from esports, from having been a key player at the conception of esports, while CS and Starcraft managed to renew themselves successfully and keep their audience.

My take on it was that ID never realized the potential of esports and after Q3Arena they squandered their resources on engine development and lenghty projects single player failures like Rage.

Meanwhile the momentum from q3arena was wasted on outsourcing q4 to a developer that clearly had no idea what they were doing. The failure of Quake 4 stopped the momentum of Quake in esports dead in its tracks.

ID realized their mistake and re-released q3a as Quake Live 10 years after its release, but by this time they had already squandered their momentum, resources and chances, and the release went largely unnoticed, even though it was embraced mostly by the hardcore Quake community.

While other companies like Valve, Blizzard and Riot had a core focus of esports much earlier and managed to adapt succesfully to a new era of competitive gaming with huge tournaments broadcasted live on Twitch for hundreds of thousands of viewers.

grabthemeger claimed the game could never be as popular as CS or SC regardless, because enough people just wouldn't like it.

What do you think?