As someone who attended Gen Con UK as a US publisher, I thought I might weigh in. It seems to me that people are being a bit too harsh.
First, as has been observed, Peter definitely was there. He's very hands on in running Gen Con.
On the topic of Easter: Holidays in the US and holidays in Europe are really not the same. In Europe, there are a whole bunch of days when entire countries seem to go home. In the US, many businesses are open on many or all holidays (we take for granted grocery stores that are open 24 hours a day, every single day of the year); and I didn't have Good Friday off of school even when attending a Catholic elementary school as a child. In particular, in the US holidays are often good for game conventions -- hotels are still open, but rarely do they have high-paying business-type conventions booked, so it's easier to find space and negotiate a good price. Hence Origins has often been on the 4th of July holiday; for decades Minneapolis hosted the MiniCon SF/F convention always on Easter Weekend. Plus, time off from work means that gamers can more easily travel long distances, if they have time off from work and need to, say, drive 6 or 8 hours. And American extended families are often separated by thousands of miles, meaning it only really works to visit your parents/siblings/aunts-and-uncles once a year (say at Christmas or Thanksgiving), so minor holidays like Easter are perfect for gaming. I can't remember the last time I went home to visit my parents for Easter. Maybe one or twice in my entire adult life? And they're only 150 miles away. (As for further relations -- my wife and I visited my aunt in Brighton, where she's spending a year teaching, while we were in the UK...probably been more than 20 years since I last saw her.)
Peter told me that he had specifically asked a lot of people last year about the Easter holiday, and was given the impression that it would be just fine and would not keep them from attending. Mind you, his reading of peoples' responses may itself have been colored by cultural differences -- he interpreted the responses as meaning the holiday would not be a problem for most people; perhaps people really meant "I'm so devoted I'll be there in spite of the holiday" or "I don't want to be rude by telling you you're obviously insane for holding this convention over Easter, so I'll nod and tell you what I think you want to hear."
So if gamers told him, "Of course, we'll be happy to drive to Amsterdam to attend Gen Con and play games in English" -- were they representative of enough gamers to make it work? The language issue isn't a question about the Dutch (I've loved every visit to the Netherlands, and never found language a problem) -- it's more a question of, will players travel from Spain, Portugal, Hungary, Finland, Poland, Croatia...and is language an issue for them? They look far away on the map, what with all those borders in between, but that's the kind of geographical range that gamers travel to the US Gen Con. I know we have fans in all those countries -- my goal as an attending publisher would be to have a venue where I could reach those fans, and if I attended the show in Amsterdam and didn't see that kind of attendance I'd be a disappointed customer.
I think Peter really felt rather blindsided by the way things turned out -- I suspect that's the crux of the cultural differences issue that concerns them. Making a huge investment in Amsterdam (and persuading a lot of US game publishers to make their own huge investments to attend), and risking a new set of problems (exactly which problems are not even known in advance, since they'll be problems rooted in assumptions and things taken for granted), is honestly not a prudent idea for them. I think if they take a couple of years to (a) polish the US conventions, which will involve quite a lot of work (with a new convention in California plus a new venue for classic Gen Con in the Midwest), and (b) work on a game plan and do substantial scouting and market research, they should be able to take a fresh start in Europe and make a really impressive convention.
They did have a plan, and it was not "knowing it would fail." I think Gen Con UK pretty much blew their plan out of the water, though, and showed them holes that they did not know were there. Rather than marching ahead into an obvious quagmire, they're taking note of the limits of their knowledge and experience, sensibly withdrawing and regrouping, working on a new plan -- not giving up.
(for a duration of 2 hours), so that is not true Bagpuss... no offence, but fair is fair.
