LAN party enthusiasts will be relieved to hear that after an initial gloomy forecast over the fate of Sydney’s largest LAN event, the Sydney Gamers’ League (SGL) has found a new owner and will reopen its doors to local gamers.
The SGL announced on their website yesterday that they would recommence holding regular LAN party events once the new owner is officially announced sometime next week.
The league, which ran its last LAN party in May of this year, had been out of action for the past three months after an announcement on their website that they were looking to sell the event to someone who would be keen to run and manage it.
After no offers were made, they announced on their website that it was “D-Day” for the SGL.
The owner of CBN Media, Charlie Brown, who bought the SGL back in 2007, told Kotaku that the sale of the event was due to a change in his business’ direction.
“When we purchased the event back in 2007, our business saw an opportunity to run and promote it, and also run video game promotions – it worked really well. But our business this year took a different direction and we decided to sell the event,” he said.
Brown said that the best people to run the LAN party was the LAN community because they have the passion for gaming and are willing to do it even if no profits can be made.
“It’s not a profitable opportunity. It needs a community to run it. The community will invest the time and love that the LAN event needs,” he said.
“It takes a lot of time and, from a business perspective, when everyone is giving up their time it can become expensive. It requires a lot of support from tech companies as well. The gaming community are going to be doing it for the love and not charging $20/hr. I wouldn’t say it could be made profitable but it can pay for itself to be run and it can pay for upgrades if it’s run well.”
Brown also spoke about how valuable the SGL would be to potential buyers because the LAN attendees were a perfect test market for hardware and technology companies.
“If you look at the event, you have 200-300 people coming every 2-3 months. They’re all really tech-savvy and are a good test market – they’re a good focus group.”
Kotaku will be following this story as more information is made available.
So will any of you be heading down to the SGL once it starts up again?
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