Gamasutra - Building Quake Live: Carmack Speaks: "What really hurt us was the initial thought of putting a web interface on it. Some things surrounding the game were certainly overly trivialized by us. That's easy to do when you say, 'Oh, we're hotshot game developers. This web stuff can't be too hard because so many people do it.'
There's a little bit of a humbling lesson there in how much work we did have to do with all the things on browser compatibility and backend database integration and optimization."