CIG wants $20 for the Citizencon livestream

[Montoya]

 

[SeungRyul]

#neverforget

 

[Montoya]

#cigmetoo

 

[Blind Owl]

#ineedmorebeer
#rsimnotangryjustdisappointed
#hashtag

On a serious note, if your a subscriber, do you what all this shit? Or just access to watch?

I'm honestly weighing whether I want to resubscribe. It shouldn't be a hard decision, but for some reason, I'm struggling with it.
Having 3 items only in my hangar is kinda refreshing.

Edit: apparently if I read stuff and things I'd find the answer, ha. Who reads?

 

[Mich Angel]

Well here is how I see it....

( I am a Imperator sub, so I can get it all anyways )

It's a But... a BIG BUT..!..
That history an logic is like this.
It is a fact and proven effect, what happen when.............

You bite the hand that feed you!
You sit on the branch you saw off!
You put your hand on a hot stove!
You say no, to a free commercial spread of your brand!
etc.........!


Here is the logic solution that most human learn at very early age !

\/ \/ \/ \/ \/ \/
\/ \/ \/ \/
\/ \/ \/
\/ \/
\/
.
.
.

You do not bite the hand that feed you!

You do not sit on the branch you saw off!

You do not put your hand on a hot stove!

You do not say no, to a free commercial spread of your brand!

You do not........etc....etc.....etc...!
The, You do not list goes on for ever..........

Serious! Who Do Not Know this??


Well that's all.. CHEERS! :beer: :beer: :beer: :beer: :beer: :beer: :beer: :beer:

 

[NaffNaffBobFace]

#ThankYouGloriousLeader!

So they are going to make $20. Bored Gamer will watch it live and then the rest of us will watch Bored Gamers roundup that day for free and then we don't have to watch the full edited stream when CIG put it up and they don't get the YouTube Ad Revenue from it.

Running your Youtube account for ad revenue sucks.

For $20 there had better be something HUGE to announce like S42 playable demo. HUGE.

"I jumped in to Spectrum which is a disaster normally" Lol #truefacts Nightrider must be a fireman because that place is a dumpster fire at the best of times. Seems to have calmed recently though so he must be doing something right :slight_smile:

Well, thinking about this positively, perhaps this is CIG saying "Hey - we've got enough money now - what we need now is your patience." and this is a test to see how many people are impatient and will pay $20 to watch live and how many are patient and will wait for the free version to go on the 'Tube.

EDIT - Okay having looked on Spectrum I've calmed down now. There are some people eating their own legs on there, so all is good.

 

[Bruttle]

Well, I'm not entirely sure what to make of this. I'm trying not to read too much into it, but it's not easy. Any time a controversial decision shows up, I try to put myself in the opposing side's shoes. I try to imagine what thought processes could have lead to a decision like this. Unfortunately in this case it's not looking so good.

For me, I pledged because it was a way to prove that there was another way. I pledged because I am firmly against the P2W, lootbox, F2P, microtransaction, paywall, DLC content blocking, hype pushing methods that the vast majority of developers employ. This was a way to take a better path. Star Citizen represented a return to a honest product. Things were supposed to be different.

So basically, at it's core, we have the "opportunity" to pay to see a commercial. It's like looking up a movie trailer on youtube but having to watch a commercial first. What I am seeing is a complete disconnect between product and monetization. They don't have a product yet, but they still are monetizing everything they can along the way. Their decision to charge is not based on a product offered, but whether or not the person will pay it. It's like seeing a marvel movie trailer come out, but you can only view it on youtube premium.

So with that in mind, I would say to CIG:

1. Without a product, it is still marketing. Do not try to make the consumer pay to receive that marketing pitch.
2. Almost $200m raised and only 2m backers. At $100 average per backer for a product still in development, you need to stop asking the current backers for more. The answer is NEW CUSTOMERS, not milking your current ones.
3. You do not get new customers by asking almost half the cost for the game just to watch a livestream of a convention.
4. Advertisement should be at the developer's expense, not the consumer. Commercials are free for a reason.
5. You do not have a single viable commercial product. Do not overestimate the power you wield. Do not overestimate consumer loyalty. When a customer gives you money to build something, do not continually go back and ask for more money from that customer.

I know they have their justifications. Some of them even come close to making sense. However, this is so very much a case of "putting the cart before the horse". They are running this company as if the game has been released in full and it has been a wild success. They are acting like they have already published the full game. That's the only way things make sense to me. I can't imagine any other thought process that would logically lead to the decision that this is a good idea.

I hope I am shit wrong on this one. No matter how I look at it though, I see a detachment from logic and reason. I see charging money simply because it can be charged, not because a thing is worthy of the charge. I see EA.

 

[Warthogsmurf]

I am not against it nor do I agree with. Here is my two cents.

1. A Con cost a lot of money and the venue will raise their prices. They do 2 “profession” streams so that costs a lot of money too. Now do the attendees need to pay for that ?
2. You only pay for live acces and everything will be on YouTube on a later date. So do you miss out on info ? No not really
3. Subscribers / concierge have acces and info will spill out that is important anyway.
4. Looking at the schedule the keynote is the most important one and the rest is just fun. The keynote will be put on YouTube the same day.
5. For Europe the time is something to consider. It starts at 20.00 with the keynote and after that you probably go to bed anyway since it is a regular work day.

Now if you think about it doesn’t seem that bad. But I do agree that CIG should have noted this earlier and considered a different approach and not 40 days before citcon. Ofc they got their feedback now and it is up to the PR team to do something about. Mind you the citcon ppl are not Jared and the developers but probably a third party. Hence the legal ***** in the FAQ.

Now to call CIG greedy , dumb etc is a bit too much. It is for most a company with expense and it needs to at least make a small profit to grow. We are there means to earn money always keep that in mind. And we don’t mind spending money on this idea of CR so the push the boundaries a bit. But where there is negative stuff let’s foxus also on the positive like the Mercury sale which was a spot with the price.

P.S at least the didn’t tweet out some kind of joke which provokes the entire globe

 

[Xist]

It looks like they're basically selling a lot of digital items for the $20. One of the items is the stream.

Maybe the other items are worth it, IDK.

From a revenue standpoint they'll make more by charging for access than by selling ads.

Definitely wasn't expecting this tho, I'm perplexed.

 

[Crymsan]

I am failing to see any positives in this for me.

 

[Will C.]

Even with tickets sold to be there and e tickets i doubt they break even om these. Last year they get sponsors and everyone gets pissed. Now this and outrage again. Id rather they try an recoup some cost. Free viewing a few days later who really cares. I have seen so much actual anger. If this affects your life that much that reaction is rage you are in too deep. At the end of the day does it effect your life i doubt it.

 

[Thalstan]

Please note, you also get an imperator subscription for the month with the ticket. So in essence, for 20 bucks, you get the 20 buck subscription package for the month. If you are a 10 buck a month subscriber, you get access to the streams, and for 10 bucks, you can buy the digital goodies. These are normally sold for 5 bucks each, so you get a 15 dollar value for 10 bucks....if you don’t want the digital goodies, you don’t have to buy them.

I am already an imperator subscriber, so so this costs me nothing. That said, I see the flip side too. However, I have been subscribing to EQ and WoW since 1999 and 2004 (and UO since 1997] and have never gotten full access to the cons with my subscriptions. I would have to pay for a ticket.

 

[Bruttle]

The thing that bugs the crap out of me is that they just jammed it out there. It was dropped on the page like nobody would mind. It's like Montoya mentioned. They were likely sitting around in a conference room and someone threw out "Hey, blizzard charges for the live stream. Why don't we?". So out it came with no spin, no pitch, no PR, just BAM! Here you go.

There were a million ways they could have pitched it. There are tons of ways they could have altered the plan ever so slightly and eased the blow. Hell, there are even a few ways they could have accomplished most of the monetization without any of the flame. But they didn't. They didn't offer an "electronic citizencon gift bag". They didn't offer "premium content and access during citizencon with subscription". Nothing. They just threw it out there like it was cool.

What I would have done, if it had to be done, would be to offer a special discounted one month membership in honor of Citizencon. This discounted month would give access to the unedited livestream. Then, instead of making a paywall, I would make a special announcement about how the content of citizencon will not be available in the usual format. It won't be played on twitch or youtube until it can be edited for content. .... or something along those lines.

I think it's a shit idea all around. However, when you push a shit idea, at least put some chocolate around it. At least put it out in some form the hard core CIG defenders can rally behind. Don't just shove it on a plate and put it on the table.

 

[Crymsan]

If it costs so much to host it then don't. They do not need there own convention to pat themselves on the back over how many ways they can scam there audience for money. They either clearly have so much money already they do not care to draw in anyone and piss of their backers or they are desperate.

In none of the other cons has there been anything shown worth paying for.

 

[Ezz]

When you make Montoya not support your move, you know you f'ed up!

 

[Bruttle]

As an update to the thread, the following is Chris' response to the structure fire that has occurred on spectrum. I still don't agree with CiG's decision to do this, but for what it's worth:

I don't post often but this is a case where I will break that rule.

Why?

Because there seems to be a lot of vitriol and outrage that is unfairly directed towards Community and Marketing .

If you're upset, you should be upset at me.

Because this was my idea.

Let me give you some context.

This year's CitizenCon is much bigger than last years, 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, 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. 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.

Yes, you read that right, the original plan didn't have any plan for streaming anything beyond the opening keynote. There was not even video archiving of the second stage due the additional costs of getting a second video crew for that stage. Even then there was some debate as to whether it was truly worth it to spend a chunk of change to stream the opening keynote for 90 minutes when we're always in a foot race to compress it as a high-quality video and post to YouTube as quickly as possible after the demo so people can enjoy a HD Video as opposed to a crappy re-post of a Twitch Stream.

While we get a nice viewership from streaming by far the most views is always through YouTube as the resulting press coverage links to it, whether its via our official channel or in the case we aren't quick enough someone else's re-posting of our stream. In terms of showing off Star Citizen, getting a high quality video up on YouTube is always our top priority. While everyone else is having a celebratory drink or mingling after the show the video team is locked away cleaning up a cut to post online, often staying up to 2am and past to do this. Which is why there was an argument to just let the attendees see it live and everyone else an hour or so later as a nice high-quality video.

Of course, me being me, wanted more.

I felt if we were bothering to put these panels on with all our top developers we should record all of it for the community to see. And if we were recording all of it then couldn't we also stream it all for the community members that were interested? And since we constantly get criticized for our home-brew approach to videography and streaming, let's bring in a specialist company that can handle multiple simultaneous stages, cameras and streams.

Now of course this doesn't help with the budget because what I just asked about adds a low six figure amount to the cost of the event. We really try to spend the money we raise on game development not community content or events. For that we use our subscriptions and try to defray the costs with sponsors like Intel last year.

Since we originally announced CitizenCon for this year in Austin there's been multiple threads about digital passes for those that can't make it to Austin midweek, I thought let's take a leaf out of Blizzard's book and have a digital pass to allow people to virtually be there for all the presentations and the money for these passes would help offset the not inconsiderable increase in costs that I was asking for because I wanted to do it better for all of you. It was a gamble because we're committing to the increased costs without knowing how many people would take us up on it but I decided we would take the gamble this year and if it doesn't pan out we'll write it up to experience and not be as ambitious in our video and live stream goals next year.

Because we do use subscription revenue for Community Content and Events we felt that subscribers should get the streaming perk for free as it is their contribution that pays for our video shows as well as other forms of community content and engagement. Also, because concierge level backers have contributed far more than anyone could expect to help us build the crazy dream that is Star Citizen I felt they should also be included (not unlike we early PTU access as a perk)

The plan is to record all presentations at a high quality, edit and post them to YouTube as we go, with the Keynote being up as soon as possible after it finished, and the other panels going out over the following days (you got to give the video team some time; we're talking 10 hours of finished content!)

Nothing was ever planned to be pay-walled or withheld form the community, and honestly I like the idea of most people seeing the presentations in their own time as a high quality video rather than a stream of potentially questionable quality. The live-stream aspect was always intended for the most ardent community members that want to see it live as it unfolds but can't make it to the event to be there in person.

We're not likely to cover the costs of the additional coverage and live-streaming but I felt we should be fiscally responsible and try to defray at least some of additional costs, which is how the current plan came to be.

We debated back and forth about whether we want to stream the keynote and closing for everyone, and have the rest require a streaming pass or require a streaming pass for all. We ended up coming down on the side of the pass for all, mostly for our ability to deliver a high quality video to everyone in short order and control the message and coordinate any press from the opening or closing. If we can give game sites a link to a video and guarantee that they will all get it at the same time we don't have to worry about different sites all trying to preempt each other, some linking to our stream, some linking to someone's YouTube re-post.

What we didn't anticipate is how dearly some of you value watching the main CitizenCon presentation live.

I get that some of you may not be considering these nuances when you're whipping out your pitchforks, which is why I thought it would help to detail our thought process and decision process. We're always trying to give you more, at a better quality, sometimes that requires us to charge for things that we haven't in the past.

But I get that some of you could feel that you've lost something that you've had previously, and you are not a true Star Citizen fan unless you've sat through an awkward live-stream with crashes and technical glitches, so we will have the opening keynote and my closing available for everyone that has a Star Citizen account, no digital pass required, with the other sessions requiring a digital pass to see live (and remember you'll be able to see these at your leisure, no restrictions a few days later)

I just don't want to see threads about how we shouldn't live-stream and just post a polished video afterwards (because that has never happened! /s)

Peace,

-Chris

 

[supitza]

I am not a subscriber, yet I'm a backer of the project. I've funded the development of a game and I'm being charged for news about its development.
@Thalstan used WoW as an example of a subscription-based game that charges for digital access to conventions: WoW was paid for and developed in-house, they have no backers to answer to. More importantly, they already have a product to showcase. CIG is not in the same position. CIG charges a premium for the chance to see a broken alpha and Jared monkeying around.
Don't you want people to see the progress you've made, so you can attract new backers? Do you instead want to alienate your existing ones?

You piss off your backers, you pull the curtain.

What amazes me the most is that while the community is on a constant slope of marketing practice disapproval towards CIG, they keep getting funds. "F you, CIG, I don't agree with the bs you're doing - but this concept ship looks nice, so here's some more money".
Bottom line is: if you don't like how CIG is handling things, please vote with your wallets. They don't give a crap about 50 new backers buying their Auroras as long as 1 whale gets another Javelin.

 

[TypeO]

Can we just say it how it is? It's fucking bullshit. I stopped giving them money a long time ago and if it weren't for our glorious community I would just abandon the game.

 

[Crymsan]

Gotta laugh at the pathetic response from Chris Roberts as if we weren't blaming him already. It is well past time he actually delivered on his promises that he has been exceedingly well funded to provide.

 

[Printimus]

Fellas, if you dont want to watch, dont pay $20. Nobody is holding a gun to your head making you watch the stream. CR even said they never initially planned to stream the event. And hey, if you dont pay the $20, you will eventually see the content on youtube or some other media outlet.

So lets not get our panties in a bunch and just breath for a minute.

There are lots of ways to get access, such as buying a ticket @ $20, already being a subscriber, or even being concierge..... if you have any of those, you get to watch already.

I'm just happy they decided to stream at all.