Just to address the balance since all these positive threads about the wonderful Dragonmeet are appearing...
Gen Con UK was last weekend. There appears to be a lot of talk about it on UKRoleplayers. The general gist of it is that it was crap for traders because the cost of entry for punters was so great that a lot of them were left feeling either (a) too skint to buy anything or (b) like they had to spend every single second playing to get their money worth and not entering the trade hall.
Any games (INCLUDING DEMOS) had to be paid for by players. Any other games being advertised had the adverts taken down. There was (apparently) no space for people to run anything either. I have not heard anyone mention anything being run which was not a demo, D&D or Call of Cthulu.
So in all it sounds like it was better than I expected, but I don't feel gutted that I was busy elsewhere last weekend.
Well...
Submitted by Gregor Hutton on Tue, 04/09/2007 - 15:29.
...that's £750 saved by not having a stand there then.
I would really like to have a UK GenCon that was vibrant, popular, but it's an uphill battle. It really doesn't deserve the name.
I read a few reports on it: Steve Ellis (who went as a player) thought it was dragging itself forward. Jim Desborough (who went with Postmortem) made a little money, but it sounded hard graft and wasn't plain sailing for retailers.
If you have to pay for a 15-minute demo then that pretty much rules me out of ever attending as a retailer. With that attitude they can go screw themselves. I think it goes against everything we do as a collective.
(I'm not averse to having to pay for slotted or planned games - that's the consumer's'choice, but nailing people heavy on the door and then for a quick demo sucks.)
To be fair, I don't think
Submitted by Rich Stokes on Tue, 04/09/2007 - 15:33.
To be fair, I don't think there was any way to have a 15 minute demo. You have to understand that Horseman Events don't realise it's 2007 and that games-not-called-D&D exist. They were charging for full slot demos and from what I can tell there was no way to arrange a 15 min demo.
Oh...
Submitted by Gregor Hutton on Tue, 04/09/2007 - 15:48.
...that's fair enough. If you have people on a table for an hour or more then they can do what they like.
Still, it doesn't sound like it'd be easy to do what we do at GC-UK. Whereas GC-US does accomodate things like the Forge Booth pretty well.
Steve Ellis' view
Submitted by Gregor Hutton on Tue, 04/09/2007 - 17:05.
...is here.
I think it sounds a lot better than the dark days of the recent past, but it still has a ways to go.
Compare it with GamesExpo, for instance. Still, I'll re-evaluate GenCon UK next year if they make it better for traders.
I'm semi-regretting not
Submitted by Andrew Kenrick on Wed, 05/09/2007 - 15:21.
I'm semi-regretting not going, but only as a punter and not as a publisher. I don't think the split sites or heavy cost of buy in and accomodation will have done us any favours.
That said, I know from reading a few reports that there was a distinct lack of rp publishers present, leading to a lot of love going the way of the small-presses who were there. Did we miss a trick by not being there to raise awareness?
As much as the location of previous years sucked, Dead of Night debuted at Gencon 2005 and did reasonably well in Butlins. Gencon were very supportive of us, even selling our books from the main Horsemen booth and allowing me to colonise the main rp area right by the door to run nearly constant games, including the infamous one with Peter Adkison as a jock.
Janos was there this year with Looney Labs (small-press board and card games) - I asked him to do some scouting for us and will try to get him to post a review up here tailored to us. Failing that I'll grill him tonight or tomorrow and post his thoughts up. I know he was very positive about the atmosphere and location, and that he lapped up the many board and card game demos that were offered. I wonder if he had to pay for them?