Following on from the recent announcement from the Prime Minister and further clarity from the UK Government on Monday meaning that hospitality venues cannot open until July 4 at the earliest, we’ve taken the difficult and perhaps expected decision to cancel the next physical event and change epic30 into an online format.

BUT, we feel that at these times, it’s important to make sure something still happens over the epic30 weekend (2-5 July) to bring people together through gaming rather than simply cancelling it, so we’re going to be pulling out all the stops to put on as much of an epic.LAN experience as we can with loads of the things you’d normally expect at our events.

We’re currently working through detailed plans for the event, but in summary, we’re still planning on bringing you a 4-day event packed with activities including:

• Big Games
• Fun Tournaments
• Esports Tournaments
• Board Games Area
• Pub Quiz
• Saturday Night 30th LAN Community Party
• Stage Content Schedule
• Community Championship
• And we’re even going to keep the boat race...somehow...

So yeah, pretty much everything you’d expect at a normal event!

With everything we plan to include, we feel that it’s only fair that there will be a small ticket price to take part in the four-day event of £15. Even though we don’t have the physical event costs of things like the venue this time, as a business we do still have overheads that we’re struggling with at this difficult time (warehouse rent, insurance, utilities, equipment/vehicle leases, tax bills etc.) and without any events taking place, it’s important that we try to cover those costs to make sure we’re still here for you in the future. There will also be the option to top up that ticket price if you wish to help out more, but we understand that it’s a financial struggle for many people now too, hence keeping the base cost as low as possible.

Some of you have also asked about buying epic.LAN merchandise to support us at this time, so we’ll be getting an online shop up and running shortly with the stock we currently have in the office and shipping this out to people in time for the...WAN.

Refunds & Ticket Transfers
We understand that some of you will just want a refund or ticket transfer to a future event, that's fine. We’ll be contacting everyone who has an epic30 ticket by the end of the week with a simple survey asking you to select your preference and we’ll get those processed as soon as we can. Please do remember though, it’s just me that has to process all of these manually, I’m only human and it will take longer than usual for me to work through them all, so bear with me, they will all get sorted, it just may take a couple of weeks to do. 

Naturally, we’d love for as many people as possible to transfer their ticket to a future event to help us out, so we will be allowing transfers to any of our events over the next 12 months. As it stands, we're still hoping that epic31 in October can go ahead even if we have to make some changes to how the event runs.

Some people have already very kindly offered to let us retain their refunds to help us survive so that we can continue delivering our events in the future. To those who have made that kind offer, thank you so much, and this will be one of the options when we contact you just so that we can formalise that and naturally you will be given access to the online event if you’ve offered your support in this way.

In 17 years, I’ve never had to make a decision like this to cancel an event, and it’s been really painful to come to terms with it now. But, there has been some amazing community spirit from many of you during these strange times, and we hope that it will continue long into the future as things hopefully get back to normal.

Stay safe, and we hope to see you at a LAN soon!

Jon & the epic.LAN Team