GotFrag.com - The highly anticipated in-browser version of Quake 3 arena, dubbed "QuakeLive" went public open beta earlier today. This from www.quakelive.com :

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.

Having been able to participate in the QuakeLive closed beta since early on, I have seen QuakeLive go from buggy and crashable, to a polished and very solid product. I say product since, although the game is free, they are hoping to monetize the game (or atleast keep it sustainable) via the in-game advertising. However, none of the advertising was turned on in the closed beta, but there were placeholders with fake ads.

Another upcoming game, Battlefield Heroes, also looks to cash in on the 3D fps in browser, supported by in game ads market which id Software has clearly taken the first jump into. I have not been able to get onto the beta today, as I am sure many of you are getting the following: You are in Line: Position in queue: 7755. All I can say is that looks like a sucessful beta launch to me.

Also QuakeLive - being so Web 2.0 - has a twitter that you can follow along to! http://twitter.com/quakelive Keep up to the minute with whats happening!