Now that twitch has announced the $10 and $25 'subscription' tiers, no issue talking about them. We won't be using them. If you see those options on our channel please let me know so we can contact twitch to opt us out of the system. Our personal philosophy when it comes to the Twitch sub (and not something we expect anyone else to follow, just how we want to do business) is that the subscription is a service. For 5 bucks you get tangible services in reward. The ad free viewing, the chat access, the early access to all vods including Cooptional podcast, Shoutcraft tournaments and all game streams, the 50 or so emotes and the frequent by email reminders of upcoming shows and news. That's what 5 bucks a month gets you and you can take it or leave it, that's an arrangement that's comfortable to us.



These other tiers are monthly donations and nothing more than that. There's no tangible extra feature set there and it's not an upgrade in service. The only way to make them worthwhile at the moment would be to strip services from the cheaper tiers of subs and that's not something we're comfortable with, mainly because you'd justifiably call us greedy bastards if we did. We don't want to encourage a culture of donations on the channel, which is why we've never promoted donations, done shoutouts to anyone and have no on-screen tracking of subs and donations in any way. We don't run a fan club, we're not pretending to be your friend. We don't want to encourage an unhealthy parasocial relationship between us and the viewers. We don't view the stream as a vehicle for trying to asking people for money. The stream is about the game and the discussion. If people choose to purchase the sub for the service then that's great. If some people view it as a donation rather than a service we can't stop them but we would only encourage people to sub to the twitch channel if they want the subscription benefits.



Any new feature that is brought in for subs will be given to every sub, there won't be any tiered subs of any sort on our channel;, we won't lock content behind a paywall and as always our vods are always available free on YouTube via fan uploads or in the case of Cooptional, a 48 hour delay. This isn't some 'look at how noble we are' post, people are free to do whatever they want with their own streams and there's nothing wrong with that. We just want to make sure our subscribers know they will receive the same level of service, there will be no division in tiers and we won't offer a sub that costs more than $5 because we don't want people treating the sub as a recurring donation. That's just our policy and our business model and how we'd like to proceed going forward.



Oh and one final thing that people keep bringing up. Twitch doesn't take 50% of sub fees from everyone. Some people are on better agreements, much better. We're one of those people, which is why we value the subscription system as much as we do rather than promoting any kind of 3rd party subscription or patron-like service. This is what we're comfortable with and frankly I don't think it's reasonable for a channel as successful as ours to ask for donations or patronage. We'd rather do business through ads, merch, sponsorships and Twitch subs.



Leave the donations and patronage stuff to people that need it rather than wasting it on us, we're doing fine. We certainly hope that twitch has no plans to forcefully lock certain features behind higher tier subs, we have seen no sign of that so far and we would strongly encourage Twitch to leave that choice in the hands of the broadcaster. Thanks for reading.