Organizers of the LGBT-focused gaming convention GaymerX2 say that this year’s event will be the last.
Despite a hugely successful Kickstarter campaign, organizers behind the GaymerX2 convention have announced on Twitter that this year’s event will be the final one, at least in its current format.
“Based on feedback that we’ve gotten, the new focus towards diversity in the industry and budget, GaymerX2 will be the final year for the con,” they tweeted. “That’s not to say that we may not do other events again in the future, but we’re asking so much out of our volunteers for the past 2 years [and] the size of our event and the amount of money we were losing to put it on became too much of a burden to keep at this pace.”
The GaymerX2 Kickstarter campaign wrapped up in March with $24,298, more than double its $10,000 goal, and it was also able to attract GLaDOS and The Sniper – AKA voice actors Ellen McLain and John Patrick Lowrie – to the event. But Matt Conn told Polygon that the high cost of running a convention in downtown San Francisco plus the inability to attract corporate sponsorships made it an unsustainable enterprise.
Based on feedback that we’ve gotten, the new focus towards diversity in the industry and budget, GaymerX2 will be the final year for the con— GaymerX (@GaymerX) April 13, 2014
Even so, he echoed the suggestion on Twitter that GaymerX could return someday. “We’re certainly not against it coming back in some other, more sustainable form, but we were basically trying to produce something that was a bit too large and ambitious for the amount of corporate interest in supporting queer geek culture,” he said.
It’s an unfortunate outcome, but I do hope that GaymerX is able to bounce back someday, even in a scaled-down format. Meanwhile, this year’s event is still full steam ahead, taking place at the Intercontinental Hotel in San Francisco from July 11 to 13.
