Friends and gamers, here are some comments on the thread so far.
Words of encouragement: Thank you, I appreciate the support! For me, sure, but most importantly, for Gen Con. It's a critical element of our hobby and as a fellow fan for years before I acquired it it has my undying loyalty and deserves our best.
Words of critique: These are well deserved. I readily acknowlege that as CEO I am ultimately responsible for all the decisions that led to this point and this criticism is well-founded. I have often run Gen Con more like a hobby than a business, just trying to create the best show I could without necessarily trying to make a profit. Providing that the business was trending in the right direction I knew eventually the profit would come. When Gen Con So Cal stopped growing and was still losing money I closed it, but Gen Con Indy is great, growing, and until recently I was willing to put all the profits back into growth. Btw, I don't get a salary running Gen Con, so the comment about me making millions on this is incorrect. Now we have a different situation and we need to run the business to make profit so we can pay back these debts. Gen Con Indy will be great but we are running it a bit more "tightly." I'm not sure if attendees will notice anything different, most of the cut-backs were in being less generous with businesses we deal with and such. In the past when we hit a snag I simply put more money into the business personally, but right now all my non-Gen Con personal wealth is tied up in Hidden City Games to build Bella Sara, a beautiful brand whose messages of how to live a positive life are impacting the lives of millions of young girls around the world. My personal interests are completely meaningless in comparison. So when we ran "that other show" this year where every single revenue line was down versus forecast (for example, sponsorship revenue was forecasted at $500,000 and came in at $20,000) it was a disaster. And, you're right, that was definitely not a high-performance mark in my career. So I fired myself. That's why Adrian Swartout is running Gen Con now as president and I'm just the figurehead! My direction to her was simple, scale back the business and quit trying to grow by doing all these other shows and stuff (we also had a big website initiative we were working on, but that idea has moved over to Hidden City Games). Let's just scale back and run Gen Con Indy as efficiently as possible so we can pay everyone off.
The charity situation: This is our top priority creditor and will most certainly get paid. We offered a solution to one of the companies suing us that would have had them paid fully by now but that settlement offer was ignored. I'm sorry I can't say more.
Gotta go!
Peter
