We originally partnered with another company and they wound up going out of business. We picked up all of the development work on that, and that was definitely

We originally partnered with another company and they wound up going out of business. We picked up all of the development work on that, and that was definitely a little bit of stumbling block and took us more resources than we expected. That was the company I use to work for. Here's my comment I posted on HN from a few days ago on an article that did not get voted to home page: ##### I'm particularly fond of Quake Live because a) I was heavy into competitive gaming back in the day and b) I dropped everything in my life and moved to California to work for the startup whose products influenced the creation of Quake Live. Assuming they still use the same technology stack, it's running on an Oracle DB and using Jabber and a few other common web languages at the transport & display layer. [There is a unique browser plugin to handle file distribution, and the game itself is a substantially polished version of Q3. There's no flash aside from maybe a few widgets.] I say 'influenced' because the tech we sold id Software for QL has been significantly altered and re-written by their very talented team to fit their own ideas and intentions. [They picked up a few of our tech guys when the company shut down.] The cool thing is based on my experience beta testing Quake Live since Dec. 07, a lot of design principles still seem to be intact. You can see screenshots of our first B2C gaming product from 06/07 here, you may notice a few similarities such as the queue system: http://startupdistrict.think27.com/colin/www/ http://startupdistrict.think27.com/colin/www/ The company had to close its doors b/c we ran out of money among other things... however, it was one of the best learning experiences of my life and I have absolutely no regrets. Very happy to see that Quake Live has finally come to life! ##### It's worth noting that we tried courting other studios to do the same with their old IP, but very few were interested. I think in retrospect we had some issues with packaging our technology to make it easy to use, but also a little ahead of our time. Furthermore, the gaming industry is so big now — it's like trying to be an actor in Hollywood. Without any street credit, it's extremely difficult to get a deal as a technology supplier and even harder to get funding. Selling our tech to id Software was a 'loss leader' that didn't pay off because, well, it took a lot longer to come to life than anyone was expecting. When we were working on the product linked to above, the hardest part was having to 'bolt on' to other games without the original source code, and I believe that was a leading reason why the B2C product failed. We always wanted to make our own game to realize the vision of game+web, we just didn't have the money/resources to do it. That said, a leading reason the B2B tech offering failed was because it wasn't easy to use — it was tailored to our experience bolting on to games. The outcome of it sucks for us, I wish we were still around but I couldn't be happier that id Software has been behind this as they are one of the few still supporting the hardcore FPS PC gamers (QuakeCon, etc..).