You could thank the developers for increasing the slot limit beyond five, but… for only two months? Seriously? Now everything is starting to make sense. What’s not clear is when the rest of the active community will figure this out, and once they do, I have no idea how you plan on returning to the market, let alone trying to sell servers.
Here’s the most important takeaway: proper self-hosting is gone for good. It seems the basic “free” license will be stripped down to a demo version simply to justify the purchase of a community server. The surprise is that these community servers don’t provide the experience that has kept TeamSpeak relevant and afloat all this time. So, it’s baffling why an average, casual user who just wants a turnkey solution would bring their money here instead of to Discord, which, by the way, doesn’t limit its core functionality at all.
By competing with your own solutions, misleading your community - and most of the time, completely ignoring it with no updates for at least half a year - you’ve forgotten that your main competitor isn’t the community that tried to keep the project alive through word-of-mouth, precisely because they could host their own servers however and wherever they wanted. Your main competitor is Discord, whose basic free service completely outclasses any of your PAID features, even if we include all the promised fairy tales (which we’ll likely be waiting years for anyway). This is madness!
An average user who doesn’t know how to self-host or manage servers won’t care about some imaginary promise of privacy and security. They will just go to Discord, create a server for their community in two clicks, and use it with almost no restrictions and with stable features that already surpass TeamSpeak’s paid communities.
Frankly, this is just sad. I don’t understand the logic. I would have been willing to pay a fair price for a proper license because your community server locations are not suitable for me. I think many others would support me in this. If you had released a client update that fixed P2P streaming, hardware acceleration, and other UX/UI flaws like the chat problems - I would have gladly, WITHOUT HESITATION, IN ADVANCE, ON FAITH, paid for a lifetime license or even agreed to a subscription model to support the developers in bringing the product to a finished state.
But instead, you treat us like fools, make up excuses, and worry about short-term profit on an unfinished product instead of actually thinking about the future - a future that remains completely unknown because there is still no news and no roadmap. What is there left to believe in?
This is a strategic failure and a complete misunderstanding of your community and the very people who make your project’s existence possible. If it weren’t for the geeks who set up their first TeamSpeak servers to chat with friends decades ago, no one would have paid you any attention, not even from your cringey posts on Twitter.
Public support, word-of-mouth, a loyal community - these are things that even vast sums of money cannot buy. I hope you realize what you were gambling with each time and, in the end, it seems you have finally lost. It was a priceless asset, something Discord could only envy. But now, even I - someone who wrote a custom bot for TS3 with features that TS6 will probably never have - have started to consider paying for Discord again.
