Greetings Citizens,

Happy Birthday, Star Citizen! One year ago yesterday, I announced the game at GDC Online in Austin. Yesterday, development team members from around the world celebrated a project that has grown faster than anyone could have imagined. We have you, our backers, to thank for this. It has been a great year, with an even better one ahead.

We planned the CitizenCon event to celebrate the anniversary with the team, who were scheduled to meet in Austin for our first company-wide development summit. As the event came together, we realized that we needed to include the community that made this game possible. With only six weeks between the Hangar reveal and the first anniversary, we didn’t have time to book a larger venue that would allow everyone to attend (an impossible task even if we had had a dedicated event-planning team!) We opted to go with a livestream presentation, revealing some of the work we’ve been focusing on in the last year.

But it wouldn’t be a Star Citizen event without a broken website or two. We’re still looking into what disabled the stream. Between the early disconnection, jittery video and the fact that the stream wasn’t available at all in Germany, thousands of Citizens missed out on seeing the Gladiator and Retaliator, the start of The Next Great Starship, the announcement about CIG Manchester, and the Hornet commercial!

If you missed out on the reveals last night, I apologize. We went with YouTube’s event streaming because we are partnering with them for The Next Great Starship. We did not realize that this would block an important part of our audience and result in the other problems you saw last night. We’re looking into the technical issues and until we have the process correct, we will be using Twitch.tv for livestreams. If you didn’t get a chance to see the event yet, you can find it here.

I can tell you right now: next year will be different. Sandi and her team are starting the planning process now with an eye towards creating an event that Citizens from around the world will be able to attend in person. To kick this off, we’re asking the community to choose the venue. Please vote in the poll below on where you’d like to see CitizenCon 2014. In future years, we hope to alternate locations around the world to give everyone a chance to attend.

Thank you for your patience and the last year of incredible support. The best is yet to come. To both the game and the community, I offer an enthusiastic Happy Birthday!