Greetings everyone,
As some of you may know, Southwest Animation & Gaming Expo has been silent since April. There have been several rumors about what we have been doing these past months, I am here to put some of those rumors to rest.
With the announcement of PAX South, we have been working very hard to keep the Expo afloat, we even questioned ourselves if the Expo would even have any validity since such a big corporate con would be coming into town with some of the same programming. We made great progress with the hotel and managed to move our dates away from PAX South. Our new dates are set for Labor Day Weekend of 2015, Friday September 4th to Monday September 7th. The move will not only ease the pressure of being so close to PAX South, but it also allowed us to get an extra day along with more meeting space.
However this came with a negative effect, we would have to owe a deposit fee of several thousand dollars by October of this year.
With the intimidating deposit, we have been toying with the idea of doing a crowd funding campaign, the intent was for it to just help cover the hotel deposit, as we already had some funds to finance the con as an event. This didn’t sit well some staff since the deadline is so close and not only that, con’s like Dashcon setting a poor example of a crowd funded cons is already taking a negative effect among attendee’s and also vendors. Both of which are essentially the life blood of any con.
To add, some staff felt that it wasn’t worth saving the Expo because such a negative publicity with these failed cons that we would be next on the list, plus the surge of corporate conventions taking over is overwhelming to the small local cons such as ours, as we have absolutely no way to compete with magnitude of those cons.
Sadly, these staff members have decided to withdraw from the Expo, taking with them the resources we so needed to promote the Expo.
We could still launch the crowd funding campaign, but we feel that it would not be worth the time and effort, again since other cons have attempted it with very limited success, but with the loss of some of our valuable staff, we would have nothing to offer. As such we don’t want to list the Expo in a long list of failed con’s. We all worked so hard, we had great and unique idea’s for programming that we thought would make us different from other conventions.
As of this time any activity will be suspended. There are some ways to save the Expo other than the use of crowd funding, we are looking for possible investors or someone who is interested in the possibility of taking full financial control of the Expo. If that is something that may interest you, then send us an email at SWAGexpo@icloud.com.
Lastly, we want to thank those who had plans to come to the Expo and those who believed in it. We did and still doing what we can to save it, It personally breaks my heart after so much work and effort of all the current and past staff that things have come to this, but if things don’t fall into place by October of this year, then we will have no choice but officially close the Expo for business. If that day does come, for those people who have pre-registered I will make it my personally duty to refund each and everyone of you and thank you for your support on this great endeavor.
-Chairman