Star Citizen studio backs away from plan to charge fans to stream convention

The keynote presentation for the annual Star 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 with a free Star Citizen community account.

The epicenter for fan outrage is not only the project’s official forums, but also on Reddit. In the Star Citizen subreddit, there are multiple threads discussing the issue, including one with more than 2,000 upvotes. Another thread on the main gaming subreddit has over 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 that Star Citizen creator Chris Roberts himself posted a lengthy defense on the project’s official message boards.

In that post, Roberts explained that — not unlike the Star Citizen project 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 a Star Citizen user account.”

Roberts also indicated that fans are welcome to rebroadcast the stream live.

With more than $193 million raised so far, the Star Citizen project is the most-funded crowdfunding campaign of any kind, on any platform, for anything. It has experienced numerous controversies since its inception in 2012. The most meaningful impediment at this time appears to be a lawsuit by Crytek, which alleges breach of contract and conspiracy. Star Citizen’s makers don’t have a deadline for either of the products it is creating and haven’t sent one since 2016. A small fraction of the project’s multiplayer component, the “persistent universe,” is playable at this time.