It was only a few days since i started participating in the closed beta Testing of Quake Live when I got the news from the Official Quake Live site.

Yep, Quake Live is going Open Beta on Tuesday, February 24 (Do note that this refers to US time).

Quake Live Open Beta

First, we want to thank everyone who has been playing, testing, providing feedback, inviting friends and hopefully enjoying the QUAKE LIVE closed beta. We’ve grown considerably over the past 6 months and are now excited to announce that we’re opening QUAKE LIVE to the general public as an open beta the evening of Tuesday, February 24th. On Monday morning (U.S. central time) we’ll be taking beta.quakelive.com down for about 36 hours and then opening to the public at www.quakelive.com on Tuesday evening.

Coordinated with the open beta will be a stats wipe and pruning of player accounts, however we want to make it as easy as possible for all of you to transition over. On Monday, we will be deleting the player accounts of people that have not played in the last 28 days. If you have played within the past 28 days, you will lose your stats, but will NOT lose your player name, custom settings, profile information, etc.. When the site opens again on Feb. 24th, you will be able to use your current email address and password to login as usual. If you have friends that haven’t played recently, but will want to maintain their account, let them know that they should play a game between now an Sunday. After Tuesday, we do not expect to ever completely wipe QUAKE LIVE player stats again.

We’re going to post some additional information in the Developer Notes about the opening of the game, what it means to leave the ‘beta’ tag on the site during this time, and discuss some features and functionality that we’re planning for the next couple of months that we know you’ll be interested in. This is a very exciting time for the project and we hope that all of you, who have contributed your time and feedback, share in that excitement. We hope all of you continue to be active contributors to the game as we work to make it better for months and years to come.

The feel of private Beta tester was good while it lasted.  At least now anyone signing up via Open Beta won’t have to wait long for multiplayer games to start.  See you guys there!

This is also posted on Game Xao, my new gaming blog.  While most of the more juicy articles remain here (and/or linked with Game Xao), most of the Gaming News that I’ve been itching to post will head to the new blog.  Please add it it’s feed to your RSS readers.