So now that this seems to be official I am curious to know, why you think that it happened?

For me failure of Quake Live seems to be TOTALLY id Softwares fault, they removed everything that made quake hell of fun: gore, rought edges from gameplay ("unbalanced weapons"), spawning system, gtv, community made content and a whole lot of other things that were central part of quake being awesome. Also features we got came way too late and active developing stopped basicly after open beta was announced.

The most irritating thing in this whole quake live experiment is that they will look this failure like: "OH GOSH, QUAKE SEEMS TO BE WAY TOO HARDCORE AND OLD FASHIONED TO SUCCESS NOWADAYS, WHICH MEANS WE CANT MAKE ANOTHER QUAKE GAME IF WE WANT PROFITT!!!!11"...

And that is just plain sad.