At least in Germany, at the time when Quake 4 was released, basically everybody who was slightly interested in gaming topics (independent from whether one loved or hated this game) knew about it because of the huge outrage that the German version of Quake 4 was so censored:

> https://censorship.fandom.com/wiki/Quake_4

> https://www.reddit.com/r/quake/comments/1namarb/quake_4_on_s...

It wasn't a real mainline Quake game by id, they got Raven to do it. Also it was single player focussed.

So there wasn't the same level of hype.

My memory of quake 4 was me and my friends were excited because it was one of the first PC games to have a DVD release instead of a bunch of CDs. This felt revolutionary at the time.

There was a QuakeLive too, playable in a browser, but it was discontinued.