let me do a lil' writeup here so those who are not currently suffering through the hell that is Quake can have a bit of insider knowledge as to what is actually going on.
Obviously both Wolfenstein and the new Doom were very well received and made a good bit of money for id/Bethesda.
id tried back in 2008 to re-launch the quake franchise by creating a F2P, in-browser version of Quake3Arena.
This was a pretty cool thing. All you needed was firefox and a URL.
It did not go well.
Quake 1 and 2 were primarily designed as single-player experiences, and while some people had a lot of fun with MP games of quake 1/2, this was a time where most people did not have internet and if they did, it was a 56k modem.
Quake 3 was more geared (design-wise) towards MP games but again it was sold primarily as a single-player game. A lot of Quake 1/2 fans bought it and were fairly disappointed because of the weird map design - no longer a SP dungeon, it was now an open arena with bots that were far more difficult than the usual mobs. Also there were no map triggers, no map progression, all weapons were available at start for pickup, and you were expected .. to die. Repeatedly.
For many Q1/2 players this was weird. A lot of these people had never played MP because of no internet. When we played Q1, we didn't even own a mouse.
Q3 was both a revolution and a disappointment. Those few players who embraced MP saw this glorious game developed specifically for them, and those who bought it on the back of the success of the previous SP games .. well, they had a bit of fun, but found it "lacking substance".
Now, here is the important bit.
As we would have been in 1999 at this time (or even later), people were starting to have internet. A whole bunch of people who bought Q3 for the SP would have tried the MP.
They found it weird beyond belief.
Let me rephrase that. *I* found it weird beyond belief.
All Q3 MP was based on private servers, so you'd find servers with different gravity, rail only, Clan Arena, CTF, etc .. all completely new and weird stuff. Not to mention modded maps.
So at this point quake diverges into two separate entities - the quake for home players, and the quake for "eSports".
Now, i can only speculate here, but i imagine that a whole bunch of home players populated these servers, on a casual basis, for some time. Eventually the skill gap between home players and eSports players became too wide, and the two communities separated entirely.
Quake continued to develop as a eSports game after Q3. They had Q4 that added a bit of new mechanics, but more importantly Quakecon happened. Quakecon, the Intel Masters, and a whole bunch of other tornaments that came with cash prizes, giving legitimacy to eSports as "a thing". Those who were in the know, loved it. Those who were just casual players had no idea any of this was going on.
in 2008 id tried to bring back Quake with the release of Quake Live, the aforementioned in-browser version of Q3. From a technical standpoint, it was brilliant. The server browser was built in, and there were some pretty decent social features to use. You could see stats, rankings, and obviously the Quake community took to it like a duck to the proverbial water.
What id failed to take into account however was the gap between home players' skill and eSports players' skill that had developed over the years. This was still a time period where people rarely owned a "gaming" mouse, and Quake fans were still overclocking their USB ports and modding their Intellimouse.
Quake Live was, as a business project, aimed at capturing again the large number of casual players that had once purchased Q3 and Q4 for their single-player campaign. It failed miserably.
The population drop was absolute comedy. id mismanaged the game in every way possible, ignored blatant hackers (DETLEV was a meme before memes were memes), made no effort to separate new players from 10+ year veterans, ignored smurfs, almost immediately took resources away from the project and had at first 2 then 1 person working on it, denied requests for private servers, so obviously what happened was:
1. a whole bunch of completely green players looked up this "new" F2P game being advertised
2. they got humiliated
3. the core community laughed them out
4. literally the most unwelcoming game in existence
5. OMGZ WHY DOES MY POPULATION DROP
(also, they had a business plan that would do well in the underpants gnomes episode of south park)
only when Quake Live was about to shut down due to having almost no players left, did id relent and allow private servers and community-generated content. This had the effect of a great boost to the health of the game, population drop stopped (or even slightly increased), and the game is still active today, in a very, very enjoyable state EVEN IF you are completely new.
Too little too late though. The idea that Quake Live could be a game to compete with CoD failed.
Obviously you can see why id would then focus on single-player games in the next years. Wolfenstein did well sale-wise, and the reviews were ok. Doom did very well and the reviews were great.
4 years ago id decided to try again with Quake, and they released Quake Champions.
This game was not designed in-house. Although it's essentially just Quake, there are a few - nice - changes.
Unfortunately it's pretty much the same situation as when they launched Quake Live. Bethesda did a big launch of the early access (lol) beta with big fanfare, and then did nothing else, and now there is ONE GUY working on it. They are not addressing fundamental QoL issues and the population drop has already gotten to the point where it's just impossible to retain new players.
This Quake re-relase is a misguided promotional effort to bring attention to the "Quake Franchise" (which currently numbers ONE title, Quake Champions) which, like everything else id has done in these last 12 years, sucks.