Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past while, dear reader, you know about the teensy weensy market crisis that is currently giving the American economy a good, solid kick to the junk.  I could definitely go off on a tangent about my personal opinion of the bailout bill, the seemingly merry ignorance of massive personal debt, and the now rewarding of Wall Street for some insanely poor business practices.

However, I won’t.

What I will comment on is a news article I saw today detailing the falling prices of game company stock.  For those of you not interested in slogging through the entire article, let’s look at the highlights for the past month:

• Activision-Blizzard.  Down 28% from $16.62 to $11.95
• EA.  Down 37% from $44.21 to $27.80
• THQ.  Down 39% from $8.34 to $5.49
• Take 2.  Down 40% from $13.01 to $8.76

Things look even worse when you look at the year on year drops.  EA has a whopping 54% drop while THQ has plummeted 68% over the last year.  This are not cheery number for an industry that was declared to be recession proof.  Indeed, it shows just how bad the current market panic is. 

My personal view is, however, that the time will soon be right for snatching up some stocks for the old portfolio at basement prices.  I fully agree with analysts who believe that the game industry is relatively stable compared to other industry sectors at the moment, although I won’t go so far as to say that they are recession proof.

The big problem in predicting what game companies will do in the current market crisis is their relative age.  We haven’t seen what happens to a fully developed electronic game market in this kind of situation. Market problems of the 80s saw a very different landscape in the realm of video games. Nintendo was king of the hill having already saved the market from a self-created meltdown. Indeed, I think Nintendo will once again do very well in the face of adversity. Their new marketing direction as seen in the Wii and DS has broadened their appeal to an extremely wide market. The hardcore gamers might be made at darling Nintendo for abandoning them for the masses, but we were the ones that started the affair cycle upon jumping ship to the Playstation.

Console wars aside, I feel that the game market itself in terms of basic dollars and cents will come out of this mess very well. In the past, movies and other forms of affordable and basic entertainment have always done well in recessions. People need something to take their minds off of the crumbling foundations of society that are all around them. Why not pick up Madden and score a few virtual touchdowns?

Me?  Well, I’m off to the bank to buy some game stocks.

This is a test of the EGCC’s web blog feature.  If you’re reading this then all is well and I invite you to continue reading.  If you can’t see this, well, then there are all sorts of technical and philosophical questions that I’ll have to address.  For the time being, let’s assume that not only did the tree fall, but it yelled “You’re winner!”.

In this opening blog I want to share my thoughts about the whole process of organizing a game convention.  Make no mistake, this is a huge undertaking we’re talking about and all the people involved knew that from the beginning.  When one also considers the Board members all have burgeoning professional careers to consider I’m sure that we must appear to be completely insane, dear reader.  Eccentricities aside, we’re not crazy but found a labour of love we are now striving to successfully undertake.

Every project begins with a reason.  Why in the world did we decide that a game convention had to be organized?  Why would a group of people get together to stress out over forming an organizing body with which to then organize and implement a top notch game convention?  I could spin my own motivations into a happy, sugar-coated paragraph full of selfless desires to aid my fellow gamer in coming together but it would be all poppycock.  I was motivated by jealousy, pure and simple.  I’m jealous of cities that have gamer conventions, I’m jealous of people that don’t have to fly on Air Canada in order to get to said conventions, and I’m also a jealous and nationalist Canadian that is wondering why the heck there isn’t anything in Canada.  Don’t get me wrong, PAX is fantastic and I’ll continue to be attending, but I don’t know how many average gamers in Canada can afford to bugger off for a weekend of Seattle goodness (particularly with the costs of aforementioned Air Canada now approaching a male firstborn child).

From the beginning jealousy and slightly aching wallet I began to poke around Canada via Google to see what might be available here at home.  What I found was almost nothing.  I didn’t realize that Canadians were so desperately in need of a game convention to call their own.  Although I don’t like pumping stereotypes, this is the True North, after all.  We having nothing to do other than play video games for 5 months of the year while the Nation enters deep-freeze mode.  The 360 has the added benefit of acting as a fantastic space heater.

Yes, yes, I hear you now suggesting that surely there must be a gamer-driven convention somewhere in Canada.  What I primarily found was numerous industry conventions such as the Vancouver and Montreal Game Summits.  As fantastic as it is to see such events strengthening Canada’s presence in the game industry, most gamers probably don’t want to attend such conferences that cost $500 for a weekend and focus on matters such as the current technological requirements of Lara Croft’s ever increasing polygons.

The trend of gamer oriented events such as PAX (which had only a few thousand attendees its first year) gaining popularity while juggernauts such as E3 wane suggest gamers are looking for something different.  They want to play games, get together, and have some fun.  Smaller events with focused content are where it is at, in my humble opinion.

Once again I searched.  Toronto has its Fan Expo Canada, a combo Sci-Fi, Anime, Horro, ComiCon, and game Convention (kitchen sink not included).  Definitely cool, but not really what I was looking for – strike against focused content.  Montreal hosts Festival Arcadia, a co-production of Videotron and Telefilm Canada.  Strike against a grass-roots community driven convention.  I could go on and on here about various smaller conventions located across the Nation, but I think you get my point.  As great as PAX is, it isn’t Canadian and Canada doesn’t have something similar to call its own.

With that initial reasoning out of the way I want to address a question that may be in some readers’ heads.  Why Edmonton?  This City is like the hot chick in high school that no on realizes is hot because she never presents herself right.  It annoys me to hell, almost as much as Lair annoyed me.  I love this City and when you get right down to it, we throw a mean party.  There is a fantastic convention centre here in which to host a con, a population that attends festivals like they were going out of style, and of course the University of Alberta which is full of undergrads that play games.  Not least of all is the homegrown development house BioWare and the City is also located nicely between Vancouver’s EA officers and Montreal’s Ubisoft presence.  Sounds like we’ve got a winner.

Now comes the hard work of taking a vision and turning it into reality while not getting overwhelmed by the big picture.  We’ll be starting small with the goals of getting gamers together, making sure they have fun, and exploring the culture of gaming in its entirety.  Step by step we will make this dream into a reality.