Yes Gamers, we have cancelled the March 27-29 2026 event, LANified! 38: Backdraft. At this point, nobody bought tickets, and that's mostly our fault. But we're not even close to giving up!

But BloodyIron, why cancel the LAN?

The fact of the matter is that I've been working for years to convert all of LANified! into a sustainable business. I genuinely believe it's worth it for many reasons, especially to ensure that gaming events and all the culture around it are maintained for as many generations to come as possible. Yes, this is also about making money, we are trying to become a sustainable business. But we want to make sure whatever you pay us for is worthwhile for you, not a rip off.

So the core of why LANified! 38: Backdraft was cancelled is because I believe we would not sell enough tickets in time to actually make this event financially sustainable. Or at least not even come close... THIS TIME.

To expand on that...

We have actually been planning the 2026 events since the end of our last event in 2025, LANified! 37: Groundswell, back in the end of November 2025. Between now and then we made progress getting the details figured out for what we wanted to do in 2026, however I was grappling with graphical artist help. I do not want to point any fingers because the involved parties are actually really awesome people, and great at their work. I have nothing but praise for them. However, they were overloaded and advised me they were unable to help. I tried to see if giving time would improve the situation, as in a few months of time in the end, and unfortunately it did not seem to improve. In the interest of moving forward I finally took actions (which I should have taken months ago, sorry) in seeking alternative help. This is namely like for poster design, event banner graphics, stuff like that. I don't want to half-ass those things.

Anyways, my efforts to find alternative graphical asset help seemed to reach a point where I felt comfortable launching the events. So we launched the 3x events for 2026, but in the end with not enough notice in the end.

I knew it was less notice than we really should have given before launching the events. But the stubborn optimist in me (have you met me yet?) thought maybe we could still attract enough gamers to make this "oops" worthwhile.

While we have through communications received more support than in the past, we were not able to actually get enough registrations and ticket sales to change our minds in time. We discussed it internally and saw far more good reasons to cancel the event, than put it on.

Also, historically March has treated us very well as an attendance stat. So I have extra affinity for March events we run.

So, sorry about that. :(

What next?

Well for starters don't even start to believe we're close to giving up. I for one am far too stubborn for that to be a thing.

We have two other events coming up with tickets already for sale, you should get your tickets today and tell others!:

1. LANified! 39: Catalyst, June 26-28 2026, Capacity: 70 BYO LAN + A lot more for Provided Tournaments
2. LANified! 40: Full Circle, October 2-4 2026, Capacity: 70 BYO LAN + A lot more for Provided Tournaments

We will be putting up posters around the city soon, we're almost done with the graphical asset being made. And then the event banners instead of the placeholders that look ever so intentionally horrible (can you tell?).

I will be putting more work into making the event pages faster and more functional. This probably will include:

1. Event Pages load times, it's like 3 seconds ish right now and I want to bring that down a lot (sub 1 second preferably). The Tournaments section is the slowest part, and there's other things on the Event Pages of similar nature that I want to hack to pieces to make faster. We have put a lot of work already into making it "as fast" as it is now (it could be so much slower), but it's definitely not as fast as we think it should be (or was hoping).
2. Make Buy Tickets part actually look good, it sucks, I want to make it not suck.
3. Improve Scheduling tab, I want to make multiple improvements here, not fully fleshed out yet
4. Gaming Preferences tab, add the ability to add games after you've registered (instead of ONLY during registration), plus maybe revisit presentation for this part
5. Reviews tab, make it actually do what it's supposed to do
6. Other event pages tuning stuff

A lot more this year, seriously.

But BloodyIron, where do you want to take all this?

2026 marks our 20 year anniversary. And I have done a lot of soul searching all these years, constantly. It certainly erodes at my confidence to realise after all this time we still are not a sustainable business. But I build that confidence back up when I realise not only all the mistakes we've made that have held us back over that time, but what we have done to fix and exceed those mistakes. There is a lot that builds my confidence back up about not only these kinds of gaming events (LAN Parties, plus other kinds) but what we want to do, how we're doing it, and also the level of interest in the general population (in many regards). I also see an ever present social value to our events that I genuinely do not believe will ever go away, even in my lifetime.

Not only do we want to make this a sustainable and profitable business, we, as in all of us at LANified!, genuinely want to make our events GIGANTIC and more awesome in ever growing ways.

When I say Gigantic, we really do not have a number ceiling. As of right now we have enough equipment to operate a BYO LAN Party of about 500-700 seats. That's power distribution, network switching, network cabling, event servers, etc, etc.

So where do we want to take this? Well right now our BYO LAN Seat capacity is about 70 people, and we have more room for participants of the Provided Tournaments too (like Smash Bros). And WHEN we need to expand, we already have facilities to work with and grow into (the exact same facilities we use now, just different section).

We want to fill the BYO LAN Seat capacity of about 70, preferably THIS YEAR (2026), so please help us do that. And once we actually do that, repeatedly, we will be working with the facilities to expand into their larger space.

How big is that? Well we don't have reliable numbers yet, but we probably are talking BYO LAN Seat capacity of about 150-200+. And there's multiple other areas for us to expand into. If we were to use all spaces at this facility, we probably would have a BYO LAN Seat capacity in the realm of 500-600 ish, but those are napkin numbers, not reliable currently.

And we want to grow even bigger than that.

So do you want to be a part of all this? Do you want to see our Gaming events get absolutely GIGANTIC? Well please help us by attending, and spreading the word as best you can!

But yeah, this is just part of where we want to take this. We also want to do more and more awesome things like reviving our Minecraft Multiverse, huge at-LAN Rust game servers (100 Rust gamers on the same server at LAN?), and seriously so much more I don't want to talk your ear off. Please don't fixate on those specific games as the only games we'll ever work with, they're just examples.

But BloodyIron, I have (a) question(s) you didn't answer! What do?

There's a few options:

1. Come ask us directly on LANified! HUB.
2. Contact us through the Feedback & Help page.
3. ???
4. PROFIT