Late May Post

Hey everyone,

I finally got the Game News section of the website working.  I can now start recruiting Community Managers / Social Media peeps to write news articles through the site and have them show up without me having to do a thing.  Once I got that working, adding an events list in the sidebar wasn't that much harder.  Drupal's been time consuming to learn, but I’m finally getting a handle on it.  There's still some parts of the site that bypass Drupal like the Jobs page, but I'm going to be fixing that soon.

Speaking of events, have I mentioned we have a booth at Sac Anime?  Two actually, side by side.  My goal is to turn our 10’ by 20’ booth space into a family room, though I've come across an unexpected snag.  Seems like furniture rental places won’t let you move furniture once it’s delivered, and they’ll only deliver to a residence--certainly not the Sacramento Convention Center.  I don’t want to outright buy two couches for Sac Anime.  I don’t have any room to put them at my place before / after the event.  What I might do is end up buying a bunch of cheap bean bags then stuffing them in my bedroom closet for next year.  But hopefully I can still pull off Plan A.

Speaking of conventions, Sac Arcade is coming along well.  I can’t make any announcements until I have more things confirmed.  But basically, people that run game related things for Sac Anime, I've recruited to do the same for Sac Arcade.  This isn't confirmed, but it’s likely I’ll also be bringing in a huge group that organizes events for PAX.  PAX, btw, huge game convention that draws 80,000 gamers in Seattle once a year--this year, all their tickets sold out in less than 5 minutes.  Sac Arcade might not be amazing the first year, but I see no reason why we can’t eventually rival PAX.

Duplicating PAX in Sacramento isn't going to be easy though.  It sounds like there’s a lot of money to be made, but that’s not really the case.  When you figure labor costs for security (you can’t rely on volunteers for everything--especially the safety of people that can sue you or expensive equipment that can be so easily stolen or broken), food and shirts for those that do volunteer, venue costs, insurance, and marketing, whatever profit I could have made for the amount of work I’m putting in, I could just have gotten a conventional job and made more money for less time.  That, and all the proceeds will get sunk right into making the next event bigger.  I think we’re going to sell out the Sheraton long before the event starts, and will likely be expanding into the Convention Center by 2016.  I've already gotten quotes from the Convention Center, and it’s really do-able.

What else?  I had a company contact us about making a game for them.  I’m on the fence about this.  Being able to finally meet a payroll would be fantastic. But as soon as we’re done with the game, we’re out of money again.  Then we go back to working on Stigma Games stuff right back where we started from: without any money to pay people and a huge chunk of time taken away.  I know some studios only exist to make games for other developers and own nothing.  That feels like it would defeat the purpose of working in the game industry.

Ok, this was a nice break, but time to get back to work.