The approach of summer usually means the start of several game conferences across the country. With the world still on the tail end of a pandemic, many conferences are choosing to go virtual, hosting Zoom-like conference calls for their workshops. Gaming Community Expo (GCX) is looking to do something different that keeps the sense of community alive: a virtual event that takes place on a space station.

The Gaming Community Expo started life as a small community gathering and then GuardianCon, a Destiny-based community conference where fans around the world could come together to celebrate the games and communities they love. While GuardianCon sounds like a great event focused on Destiny, it has always been much bigger than that, and much bigger than the Tampa bar meetup of roughly 1000 people that started it all.

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Since seeing the interest in a Destiny-based conference, Ben Bowman, AKA Professor Broman, Charity Director and Co-Founder of GCX, got to work on making another fan event more like a convention, signing up influencers and content creators to attend the event that would become known as GuardianCon. Leveraging the power and influence of the people attending the conference, a seven-day, 24-hour a day charity stream was born, raising half a million dollars for St Jude Children’s Research Hospital the first year.

“I wanted anyone from anywhere in the world to tune in and say, ‘Wow, I am helping cure cancer for everybody on the planet.’ St Jude had the chops, they had the history, they had the research team, so we went with St Jude.”

Since the early days of GuardianCon, the event has grown tremendously, incorporating more than just Destiny fans. Opening the doors to more and more gaming communities lead to the eventual rebranding of GuardianCon to what the conference is known as today, the Gaming Community Expo, also known as GCX.

GCX has continued to grow and continued to raise money for St Jude Children’s Research Hospital. While the 2020 event was canceled because of the global pandemic, Bowman and his team at Rare Drop (the multi-faceted company that runs the Expo) got to work planning for 2021, with the idea to honor the people who bought tickets for the 2020 event while also opening up GCX to as many people as possible. With that, the 2021 GCX Space Station was born, allowing virtual access to attendees across the globe.

While planning an in-person event has its hurdles to overcome, planning a virtual version of the same event is a different challenge. While the Charity Stream associated with the event is still largely the same, the event itself had to adapt to the current state of the world. At the time of planning the 2021 event, the direction was unclear at first, mainly because the state of the world for summer 2021 was also unclear. Making GCX 2021 an in-person event may have backfired, leading to the virtual version of the event taking place this year.

With a virtual event, GCX could have taken the route of many other virtual events and simply had Zoom-like video conferences, but Bowman and his team knew that was not the right move for GCX and would take away from the community feel of such an event, so planning a virtual conference that still allowed community engagement was crucial, especially in a time when people are eager to connect and engage with one another beyond a Zoom meeting.

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So, what does this virtual convention look like? Well, explanation and visualization are quite different, and a verbal explanation does not do the event justice. With proximity chat and custom characters, attendees can expect an MMO-like setting where they can interact with attendees, vendors, and the environment as well. Be sure to check out the statues in the main stage area to get a better idea of what things become possible with such an event. Ticket holders will receive an email prior to the event, inviting them to download the launcher to access the Virtual Space Station. For ticket holders that cannot access the launcher, they can access the event through a web browser.

The people who purchased tickets to GCX 2020 prior to its cancellation will be able to attend the virtual GCX 2021 event for free and will also have their 2020 tickets pushed to the 2022 event. This means that people who purchased tickets for the 2020 event will be eligible to attend both the virtual 2021 event and the in-person GCX 2022 event next summer. While there are plenty of amazing plans already in store for the 2022 event, there is still a lot of time between now and then, so fans will have to wait and see what next year’s event has in store. Either way, the 2022 GCX event is already shaping up to be a tremendous event.

“Anyone who was a ticket holder from last year, we had hoped for an in-person event, and we wanted to make sure we honored that, so we transferred their tickets over to 2022, and they also get entry into our 2021 event in Unreal Engine.”

Other people who would like to attend this virtual 2021 event will have two different ticket options available to them. A Standard Pass will be $55 plus $4.29, for a total of $59.29. The Standard Pass covers general admission to GCX 2021, from June 17 through June 20, 2021, and will cover a $5 donation to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. The Premier Pass will cost $100, plus $6.99 for a total of $106.99. The Premier Pass will donate $10 to St. Jude while also granting access to exclusive merchandise that is sent separately via email, a custom GCX in-game skin, and a swag bag delivered to the attendee’s door.

Starting on June 13, 2021, the Charity Marathon streams for GCX will still be a major part of this event. GCX 2021’s Charity Marathon has a diverse set of content creators all doing their part to bring entertainment to their fans while raising money for St Jude. With content creators like Ekuegan, KayKayEs, and Caliverse being among the many personalities who make up the Marathon Fundraising Crew, there is sure to be some entertainment for everyone to enjoy while helping raise money for a noble cause.

Considering the GCX 2021 event is much more than a few Zoom meetings, the price of attendance is quite fair compared to the pricing of other events that offer much less. GCX aims to continue growing, bringing back in-person events and the possibility of continuing a virtual version as well. With the amount of planning that goes into these events, some ideas may not happen between now and the GCX 2022 event, but one thing is for certain, Ben Bowman and everyone at Rare Drop are committed to bringing GCX to as many people as possible while continuing to raise money and awareness for the St Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

Tickets for GCX 2021 can be purchased on the GCX website here.

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