There’s been a lot of buzz around the Internet about Quake Live.  I decided to succumb to the hype and try it out and I must say it is pretty cool.  However, a lot of people have heralded this as a unique new way of distributing games, and I have to disagree with that.  Quake Live is no different than any other downloadable game, it just happens to use the browser as a host.  When you go to http://www.quakelive.com for the first time, you log in and wait in a queue.  When you reach the front of the queue, you are prompted to download a plugin (in the form of a Windows Installer MSI file) for your browser.  If the queuing thing sounds very FilePlanet-esque to you, it certainly does to me.  Then you download the game plugin installer and run it (as an Admin).  When it finishes, you have to restart your browser and go back to the website.  After waiting in the queue some more, the game loads up and runs in the browser.

How is this process different from installing a regular desktop game?  You download the installer, run it as Admin, and then start the game.  The only different here is that the game code is running in-process (AFAIK) with the web browser.  It really isn’t that different!  Developing a game like this using an existing plugin like Flash or Silverlight (especially since Silverlight 3 is supposed to include 3D Acceleration support) would be, IMHO, much more innovative.

About the only thing in Quake Live that differs from a regular desktop game is the use of a streaming installer, which downloads a (relatively) small bootstrapper and then downloads the rest as you play a 10minute training level.  Even that isn’t really unique, as Scott Hanselman points out, Guild Wars has included that feature for a while.