Over the past week, fans of Star Citizen have been in a kerfuffle with Roberts Space Industries over the $20 fee required to view the CitizenCon keynote address. As a result, RSI has opted to remove the fee to make the speech / presentation viewable for free. According to the post, the fee was introduced to offset the larger-than-expected CitizenCon.
In Robert's initial post about the issue, he wrote:
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.
'After sleeping on it', Roberts returned with the announcement that the fee would be removed:
After sleeping on this, I am going to chalk this one up to experience. We're going to cut back on the live-streaming crew / costs but have both stages streamed for anyone with a Star Citizen user account. Star Citizen Content Creators are welcome to rebroadcast our stream live. If you would like to support the additional costs of streaming all the presentations, you can support the show by purchasing the CitizenCon digital goodies package (Imperators still get this as their October flair)
CitizenCon is currently scheduled for October 10, 2018.
Read the full posts on the Star Citizen site.
