[fistynuts]

This is looking at the past with today's eyes. There was no concept of "maintaining" games as you might expect today. Games were finished, put out on disk or CD, and that was usually that. Patches were sometimes introduced to fix bugs or improve compatibility with certain hardware, but that was usually the limit of support. Quake received far more support post-release than any other game at the time. There were many patches, game improvements and fixes. ID released GLQuake to support the new trend of 3D acceleration (the base game was software rendered only). They released QuakeWorld to support the growing player base who wanted to play multiplayer across the internet. And they released several expansion packs to provide a large amount of additional single player content. This is far, far from "abandoning" a player base. I don't know what more they could have done other than make all of their future games in the Quake 1 engine, which would have been commercial suicide given their reputation for being at the front line of PC technology.