The quake tragedy

[megaman3]

What! Come on, thats so naive. The servers are not spawned as new servers, the "servers" that you create are simply games hosted on machines that have been set up as Quake live servers, it is the same as hosting a custom match in starcraft. All it costs is the bandwidth that you use, the same as any other server, how would any servers survive so long if they were like you think??

Why stop there? Why not pay $100, if you're working and can't afford $100 there's also something very wrong, or what about the WoW pricing model, people pay that just fine so why not $12 a month for QL too? This is basically what youre saying "I don't mind paying $10 for a something thats worth $1 because its still affordable". And in your example of the apple, if I go to 1 store and they are charging me $4 for an apple as opposed to 50c, I don't not buy it because I can't afford the apple, I go to another store and buy it for a reasonable price because $4 for an apple is a *&@!!$ rip-off.

And please stop the arguments about the player base being large people, I mean gzuz, a couple hundred to a few thousand players across the entire world playing at any time and you talk about things being fine and this business model working great? Are you kidding me? Wake up, quake is legendary, this series should be the biggest title at major events, it should be watched by tens of thousands of people and hundreds of thousands to MILLIONS of players should be competing in all game types, THATS what quake deserves, but this community is satsified because they have 3 full servers to choose from, i mean what in holy lucifer are you guys smoking??

This is what a quality q3 server costs. It is not the same as hosting a sc2 server for one match, as you should know. http://maverickservers.com/game_hosting.html
Then again $48 give you one premium sub + 5 invites (pseudo 6 accounts total) + spawning servers whenever and wherever you want in the world. Tell me 1 (one) game of this business model ("freemium" or "subscription based) that is cheaper than QL and/or that gives more to non-paying players the minute they join the game. I'm telling you there is none, but Q3/QL players are used to pirating everything.
About pricing, what I'm saying is the exact opposite. A pro sub gives you hundreds if not thousands of dollars worth of benefits, for just $48. You just didn't know.

Well we had events with tens of thousands of people watching QL, you just didn't know, and "e-sports" don't work like you said: it's not about them being legendary (otherwise QW would be the hottest thing) but it is all (and I mean all) about marketing and sponsorship. There's simply no much money nor players involved (both as in millions) in QL so everything is community-made and it achieved remarkable things in QL (it made to eurosports ffs).
And there are about 4m accounts. You won't find many games with that many, or many games with that many active players (lets say 50k to be on the safe side) that are this old (1999) or that much alive competition wise (including online and offline tournaments QL and how prizes are distributed [1v1 instead of 5v5], Q3 and QL have always been ahead CS. You just didn't know.).

And like ShaZe (with a Z) said, if you can't afford $2 or $24 then there's something very wrong and hf with spending money in other hobbies (hint: nothing is free in life). $24 is absurdly cheap for a year's worth of entertainment but you complain like it was a life or death situation instead of just paying.