Seems like the Minecraft community might have been marked out as an easy target. Another unofficial Minecraft convention has been called off five days from the date it was meant to start on, in fact it was due to happen this weekend – the forth in six months.

The convention in question was named Mine-o-rama and was due to take place in New York over the weekend of the 12^th and 13^th of July, but was called off at very short notice. The reason given for the cancellation was that the con-organisers had wished to stream live feeds of panels and events but had been met with refusal of permission from Mojang to actually do this due to the fact that said livestreams would have been pay-to-view – probably due to Mojang’s EULA saying that you cannot make money from their game, with a few exceptions. This, the organisers claim, means that they didn’t have enough money to run the event.

This of course has left a lot of attendees with tickets they currently cannot use and in some cases flights to New York and hotel bookings to attend an event that is no longer being held. However many of the booked guests have hastily begun to organise fan meet-ups for their fans to give them something to attend on the trip at least.

The Mine-o-rama Twitter account has acknowledged that the cancellation has left many fans disappointed and out of pocket but have said they tried desperately to re-plan the event but were left with a shortfall of about $175,000. They have said they are hoping to have the team meet next week to plan rescheduling the event but so far refunding people has not come up although the tweets are all terribly apologetic.

As with the last big Minecraft convention cancellation (article can be found here) BebopVox of Minecraft Mondays has put together a video on details he dug up that were publicly available:

The article about the event published in Forbes magazine was also referenced on the Twitter account, with the number of ‘7,500 tickets sold’ disputed as being 2,000 sold at the time and another 5,500 promised to students of which about 3,000 were actually sold. It also disputed the total of $1 million saying that in the end they only raised around $600,000 through ticket sales.

It’s another tricky situation, and I’ll be watching as the story develops more. My heart goes out to those left disappointed and I hope that the fan meet-ups that are actually organised go as smoothly as they can be.