When Quake Champions was announced last summer by Bethesda, developer id Software said it was still evaluating what business model it would deploy (free-to-play vs. pay-for). Today, it confirmed to GameSpot that the game will be free-to-play, with an option to pay for it if that's what you want to do.

The news comes from Creative Director Tim Willits who said that users will be able to play one character -- the Ranger -- for free, or they can buy a Champion Pack to get unlimited access to the Ranger and the rest of the characters. How much this Champion Pack will cost, was not revealed. If you're interested in going the free-to-play route, you'll want to know that you can spend in-game currency, which is referred to as Favor, to unlock any of the other characters, but they will only be unlocked for a certain, undisclosed, period of time.

Willits explained the model to Polygon, saying the following:

"At its core, it's a free-to-play game, with the option to buy the Champion Pack and just get in and play with all the Champions. There are a number of Quake players that just want to play their Quake, right? And they are familiar with the business model of our previous games, and they are totally fine. 'I want to buy the game. I want to start playing. I want to have access to all the Champions. But then we also understand that we want to get as many people into the game as possible, especially outside of North America and Western Europe, where we have a massive fan base. So we want to have the flexibility to have a free-to-play option for those people."

According to Willits, everyone, regardless of whether you pay or not, will be put into the same matches, with all the same maps. The only difference is character access.

As you may know, two days ago, Bethesda announced closed beta sign-ups for the game. The beta is said to be arriving sometime "soon."

Quake Champions is currently in development for PC and is poised to release sometime in 2017. Console versions of the game are said to not be out of question.