pouët.net

“Pay to vote” is in fact the cuckoo egg you yourself planted in my nest. My idea is “pay only physical entrance and that’s it”. I was trying to imagine how to find some kind of middle ground. Of course I failed because in my disdain for inject-money-everywhere I’m being so dumb I fail to see how the systems can be exploited. Money sucks. See as long as there is money involved, there will be sooner or later trouble. But you and I exchanged a few thoughts on this already on CSDb. My theory is - you let the money in, you get Dreamhack sooner or later. But, again, I’m aware not everybody here is on the same page about money, proffessionalization, commercialization.
Maybe if some orga explained to me why the fee for remote submissions is needed, instead of me relying on your educated guess that it’s a kind of preselection tool, things would be clearer.

As you can see in the other thread, it is and will always be chiefly non-profit, and they struggle hard to cover the cost.

I still find some restrictive (e.g., must submit an entry to vote - to avoid pay to win) online-only ticket a good way to recover some of that cost.

Like it or not, sofasceners are second-class citizens at any demo party.

Exactly this. There is one party in the world that has the problem “compos are too long, due to too many entries”. The demoscene will not suffer if remote entries are spread across non-Revision parties, be it the second-largest ones or the smaller ones.

Here you go.

How many remote submissions are we talking here? The cumulative financial effect of removing the remote submission fees would sink the party? Really? It can’t be offset to attendees? Attendees wouldn’t want to pay €1 or whatever more to see more good entries? What impact do remote submissions have on party expenses and by which metric? Is paid video stream coming next? So many questions. I personally would rather donate €35 than pay to play. I’m not the only one. Maybe some money comes from UNESCO, which would fit nicely in your “UNESCO” thread.

Well that would be a hard quantifiable fact. Would love to see that posted there! :)

I guess this csdb thread was an outlier and should not be counted...?

@gasman: I actually counted that thread to get to 50%. So you can imagine where my group mates and other C64 buddies I have stand.

To get some numbers and facts:

Roughly 20% of entries are from people at home or Satellites and around 70% of those pass preselection. Satellites get access keys from Revision for free in exchange for organizing the remote event.

This year, we had the largest number of remote tickets, remote supporters and -submissions to date. Something that tells me that the concept as a whole is at least somewhat accepted.

This is not about "needing" more entries, it is about trying to include as much of us as possible while remaining a mostly on-site event. All on-site visitors are "paying to play" but they pay way more because the on-site event has more offerings and ameneties for on-site people than for remoters - which I think is very fair.

This is also not about making money, even though I must admit that this option does nowadays play a small role in financing this endeavour.

We put a large overall amount of work into making the event accessible for the outside with having around 10-15 people dedicated to filming, streaming and commenting alone and not talking about the money necessary to facilitate this infrastructure. I can assure you that alone the rental of cameras and other equipment necessary to stream Revision surpasses the revenue from remote tickets by far.

Paying for admission has always been a thing even though there are events with free entry - but those tend to be on the smaller scale and/or with fewer outside costs or more sponsors/supporters. Yes, we could afford doing Revision without a price tag on the remote tickets but we would also have a large number of releases without remote entries in general.

You are saying that "pay to play" is very un-demoscene. I'd like to ask the question how your comments about a reasonable fee to ensure that the largest demoscene event stays possible and accessible to as many people as possible is "more demoscene"?

Same with not passing preselection. People submitting entries while paying the full fee are subjective to the same rules in terms of our quality and time constraints and are indeed not "served with a 3 page fineprint agreement". In my memory of 25+ years of demoscene activity, I cannot recall somebody demanding that their entry has to be played because they paid for admission. Will you demand first place because you paid for admission as well?

In any case, after reading your thread on csdb, I deduct that you, as an artist, find it insulting to pay for being able to showcase your work. I understand and accept your opinion.

Personally, I have a different opinion. Firstly, as somebody who organizes non-profit demoscene events for 20+ years find your comments and the insinuation that we are doing this for money, insulting. Secondly, I will also assume that you have little to no experience in organizing large scale events and the financial and personal burdens this puts on the people involved. If I am wrong with my assumption I will gladly apologize after reviewing your resume in that capacity.

I am sorry that Revision is not working out for you ideologically, but as others pointed out in this thread already, other parties might be more thankful for entries and will probably gladly accept your free contribution.

I mean obviously the solution is to unkill the American demoscene!

I quote from an old TUM rules page:
“Since the competition prizes are paid by the party participants and the remote participants don't pay an entry fee, we can't give prizes to remote participants.”
As far as I know - please correct me if I'm wrong - the Revision orgas have always sent the trophies to the winners of compos, even if they were remote entries.
I think the “pay to play” approach solves several problems at once.
You can not make anyone participate remotely for free otherwise you may get flooded with entries.
On the other hand if you allowed remote voting for free you might get manipulated results due to ppl registering multiple accounts etc.

@D.Fox:
Thanks! I do see your logic, although it seems a bit upside down. Reading your post I see a lot (if not most of) the “pay to play” money goes to ensure the technical quality of the video stream. And keep that stream free. It does seem a bit like charging players so that viewers can watch the game, but hey OK. I don’t really produce stuff Revision could benefit from, I was just curious. Again, thanks.

I thought you read the CSDb thread. Here, let me help you: It’s EXACTLY because I KNOW that this is not a money grab that I find the “pay to play” fee clumsy and awkward.

Ok I guess I misread that. Still, what makes that one „pay to play“ and on-site participation doesn’t? How’s that fair?

When on site I pay for the whole shebang. For the party. Being on-site was (almost) always “pay to play” whether it’s Revision or puking drunk in an elementary school gym with other 50 teen nerds in 80s Netherlands. Being on-site is the whole point. Being on site IS THE DEMOPARTY. Do you think that if I wanna go to Revision, I’ll say “it’s not fair that the remote submissions are free, I’m not going?!” Plus, when on site I get to vote (and yell amigaaah). My suggestion was; make the remote submission free and remove voting powers from remoters. Charge a little extra to attendees if absolutely needed. That way no asshole (me) can come and bitch about it. Or don’t.

Attendees of the venue proper subsidising sofasceners or sofasceners footing some of the cost of the event itself to be able to participate with entries... what's fairer?

Sofasceners paying for the stream of course.

You misunderstood me there. The money is going to Revision, not to a particular part of it. We will have the stream always and I cannot see it to be a paid stream ever. The viewers never had to pay to watch.

If you want to take an active role, be as voter or creator - you are able to do so - for a portion of the fee that we charge for on-site people. That’s what it’s about and I personally think it’s fair.

Paid streams would also be very bad for the outreach endeavour.

Yeah don't make the streams paid, that'd be really weird.

Don’t worry about that.

@Krill:
You’re cherrypicking. Or you’re not because you said “also”. But still let’s get it clear: Indeed paid streams would be bad for outreach. Remote submission fees too.

So, let me get this straight. And please uderstand that I’m not criticizing here and now, I just want to be able to connect the dots, while checking if we all see the same dots. I’ll disconnect my socialist impulses for this. So. Putting all other expenses (and there has to be a gazillion) aside for the moment, we can state that getting high quality video coverage of the event to people’s homes is expensive. You want to provide people with this service for free. Let’s borrow some capitalist talk for a sec. In other words you want content creators to pay so that consumers of the content don’t have to.

Eh what?

First, what we want and what we have to do are two completely different thing.

Second, your statements only makes sense if we would provide the stream for a world outside of the demoscene community while all of us were present at the party. This is obviously not the case as we are first and foremost do the stream for the part of the community that can’t attend in person. A free stream has many upsides and little downsides. Also I’m sure you know yourself that you are just baiting with your comment :)

Third, we live in a capitalist world and sadly have to adhere to at least some of the rules in terms of „paying for services rendered“. When we did Revision onloke we had little cost and could therefore provide everything for free with money we still had in the account (at least in the second and third years afair).

And lastly. This is how we decided to do it and, while this is always subject to change as times and circumstances change, this is what what we will continue to do until a large part of our community is no longer supporting it.

(Sorry for typos, sitting in the car, waiting for my partner to come back from shopping. Maybe I should charge for taxi services!)