Star Citizen studio backs away from plan to charge fans to stream convention
Chris Roberts steps up to defend his plan on the official message boards, later announces all streams will be free
The keynote presentation for the annualStar Citizen fan convention, called CitizenCon, has long been free to stream online. This year, the team behind the event made the decision to charge a $20 fee for digital access. Those rights were to include access to the keynote presentation and, for the first time ever, complete coverage of every panel and presentation held at the event. Instead, they’ve been forced to walk back those plans due to fan outrage.
All streams of CitizenCon this October, including the keynote and its various sub-components, will be available for free to anyone witha freeStar Citizencommunity account.
The epicenter for fan outrage is not onlythe project’s official forums, but also on Reddit. In the Star Citizen subreddit, there are multiple threads discussing the issue, including one withmore than 2,000 upvotes. Another thread on the main gaming subreddit hasover 2,400 upvotes.
“I support you [Cloud Imperium Games],” reads the title of the first thread, “but I will not be buying a digital ticket just to watch Citizencon [sic].”
The outcry has been so vitriolic thatStar Citizen creator Chris Roberts himself posteda lengthy defense on the project’s official message boards.
In that post, Roberts explained that — not unlike theStar Citizenproject itself — CitizenCon has expanded in scope and therefore requires more funding to achieve his vision.
“If you’re upset, you should be upset at me,” Roberts writes. “Because this was my idea. [...] This year’s CitizenCon is much bigger than last years [sic], with two separate stages and tracks. We did this because we felt the format we tested last year was a success and because of this we wanted to expand it to allow more people to attend and provide more opportunities to hear from and interact with the devs.
“With a venue and planned attendance three times the CitizenCon in Frankfurt, [Germany] with more panels (so more devs needing to travel), more food and drink options for everyone the proposed budget for this year’s CitizenCon was almost double last years [sic]. And this was without any video coverage, let alone streaming of the second stage, and a plan to just stream the opening keynote from the main stage.”
The original post was placed on the message boards around 2:50 a.m. ET. Roberts has since updated the post, saying that the fee has been waived in its entirety.
“After sleeping on this, I am going to chalk this one up to experience,” Roberts wrote. ”We’re going to cut back on the live-streaming crew/costs but have both stages streamed for anyone with aStar Citizen user account.”
Roberts also indicated that fans are welcome to rebroadcast the stream live.
Withmore than $193 million raised so far, theStar Citizen project is the most-funded crowdfunding campaign of any kind, on any platform, for any thing. It has experiencednumerous controversies since itsinception in 2012. The most meaningful impediment at this time appears to be a lawsuit by Crytek, which allegesbreach of contract andconspiracy.Star Citizen’s makers don’t have a deadline foreither of the products it is creating and haven’t set onesince 2016. Asmall fraction of the project’s multiplayer component, the “persistent universe,” is playable at this time.
