Penny Arcade and ReedPop have officially canceled the East Coast’s largest video gaming convention due to ongoing concerns about COVID-19. They’d hoped to be able to run the convention in person, and had even set dates of June 3-6. That’s significantly later in the year than usual, presumably to give time for vaccine rollout.
However, it seems Penny Arcade has decided that discretion is the better part of valor. Instead of hosting PAX East in meatspace, they’ll be running PAX Online from July 15-18.
While we can’t deny that we’re disappointed to be missing out on this great event - an event that we’d hoped would signal the return to more-or-less normal life - we appreciate that Penny Arcade is putting people’s safety first. There will be many more conventions, but we only get one life.
Speaking of more conventions: According to the official PAX Twitter, they’re “cautiously optimistic” that PAX West (Sept. 3-6) and PAX Unplugged (Dec 10-12) will proceed as normal. PAX West is a bit out of the way for us East Coasters, but with any luck we’ll see you all at Unplugged. With that in mind, we'll wait until July for PAX Online 2021 - while we had hoped that their online experiment would only be needed for one year, we did enjoy ourselves with the host of free demos and panels that came with the event.
Until then, stay safe, ride out the end of this pandemic, and game on!
