Quake Champions Tore Out the Battle Pass and Loot Boxes. Now It Costs $10.

Games go free-to-play. That is the direction the traffic moves, and it has been for a decade. On Wednesday, id Software and Bethesda drove the other way. They took a nine-year-old free-to-play arena shooter, pulled the monetization out of it, and put a $9.99 price tag on the Steam page.

The 1.31 point release notes do not bury it. "Today's update marks a new chapter for Quake Champions as we transition the game from a free-to-play service to a paid application on Steam," id wrote. "Battle Passes and microtransactions have been removed. Quake Champions is now available for one low price on Steam." One sentence later, id adds that "No additional content updates are planned at this time."

Everything that came out

The removal list in the patch notes runs eight items long. Microtransactions and in-app purchasing, gone. The Battle Pass, gone. Weekly and event challenges, the in-game Store, the Platinum and Shard currencies, loot boxes, daily login rewards, and Champion progression (the shard reward path) all went with it. That is most of the scaffolding a 2017 live-service shooter was built on, removed in one patch.

In its place, every Champion is unlocked from the start and most vanity content is yours to equip from the Customization menu, which now sits in the top navigation of the main menu. No more buying characters one at a time.

A few things stay locked, and id names them. Third-party entitlements like the AMD Ruby Nyx skin, the Twitch Rocket Launcher and the Nvidia Pulsar Railgun are hidden from your Customization list unless you already own them, and so are merit-based rewards like QuakeCon Belts. Golden Crowns are the one exception. You can still earn them by reaching Elite Rank in ranked play.

If you ever played it, you already own it

Anyone who played Quake Champions on Steam before September 23, 2026 keeps it. The paid version turns up in the Steam library at no additional cost, no action required.

Microsoft Store players have a narrower path, because that version has been retired outright. Quake Champions is Steam only now. If your Bethesda.net account was already linked to a Steam account, access gets granted automatically, and Bethesda says to allow up to 48 hours. If it was not linked, you need a Steam account, then you sign into Bethesda.net and link the two through Bethesda's linking page. That service runs from September 23 through October 7, 2026. Miss the window and you are filing a support ticket and hoping for a case-by-case grant. Rank and player profile carry over either way, as long as it is the same Bethesda.net account you played on.

The refund window is 60 days, and that is the whole window

Bethesda's FAQ draws an exact boundary. "Players who purchased a Platinum pack within the 60 days before September 23, 2026, will be refunded. Please allow 5 to 7 business days for your Platinum purchase refund to be processed." Purchases made in Japanese yen get a longer window, six months before September 23, which the FAQ attributes to local law.

Sixty days, and nothing older. Platinum and Shards you earned in-game are not refunded either. The FAQ's answer there is one line: the items those currencies used to buy are now available to all players.

The part that stings

Which brings up the other side of this. People have been buying Quake Champions skins since August 2018, when the game went permanently free-to-play at QuakeCon after a year in Steam Early Access. Those purchases funded eight years of seasons. As of Wednesday, most of that cosmetic content is sitting in everyone else's Customization menu for the price of one $10 purchase, or for nothing at all if they happened to load the game once in 2019.

That is how shutting down a currency works, and it is hard to picture a version where it goes differently. It still means the players who spent the most got the least out of this update, and the refund policy reaches back two months into an eight-year history. Worth saying plainly rather than filing the whole thing under good news for everyone.

There is a real patch underneath

Tearing out the store was the headline, but 1.31 is a substantial update on its own. A new callvote system lets you right-click a player in the in-game social menu to start a kick vote against cheaters and abusive players, with a four-player minimum and a cap of three votes per player per match. Weapon accuracy can now show on your HUD, either for your current weapon or across the whole weapon bar. The level cap moved to 999. Bots got a long list of fixes, including the ability to recognize incoming rockets and dodge them, and they are now marked Level 0 on the scoreboard so new players can spot them. id also fixed several map-loading crashes and an anti-cheat false positive that was surfacing as an Error 103 message.

One line in the notes reads less cheerfully. id has reduced the number of datacenter locations to consolidate players into fewer server locations for faster matchmaking, and recommends checking your datacenter selection against the new queue-size stats in the Play Now menu. Fewer servers for faster matches is what you do when the population no longer fills the ones you had.

Should you spend the $10

Check your Steam library first. If you installed Quake Champions at any point in the last eight years, it is already sitting there, fully unlocked, and you owe nobody anything.

If you never did, $10 buys a complete arena shooter with 30 seasons of content, every Champion, and nothing trying to sell you anything while you play. What it does not buy is a future. "No additional content updates are planned at this time" means the game you download this week is the game it stays. For a shooter built on the bones of Quake III Arena, finished is a more reasonable place to land than it would be for most live-service games. Buy it for what is in the box.