Narrated by: Larry S. Dixon Jr.
Hello Everyone,
We have been constantly monitoring the recent events with the COVID-19 virus that has gone from a health advisory in our local city/region just a week ago to a worldwide pandemic. We value everyone’s health and safety during this time of crisis and our perceived lack of response until now is not due to us not caring about our attendee’s health/safety! We were taking all the steps we needed to properly address the public. Since 1997 Final Round has been apart of the fabric of the FGC even before it was called the FGC. There has been tornado’s ravaging the city of Atlanta during the event and we didn’t cancel the event. We have had a venue that for two straight years that the event attendance couldn’t pay for itself even with corporate sponsorship and we didn’t cancel. It’s with a heavy heart and a great responsibility to our community health/safety that we cannot run Final Round 2020! With people traveling from not only around the USA, but around the world and visiting the busiest airport in the world we can not be the cause of potentially spreading COVID-19 throughout the Southeast region and beyond for a video gaming event.
We take our staff/volunteers/attendee’s safety/health very seriously and our prior statement of still running the event was made due to the projections in our city/area that there was only a health advisory with no confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Georgia. Within that time COVID-19 went from no case in Georgia to just two cases confirmed and then to over 41 in the matter of a week. It goes without saying that everything is fluid in a situation like this and we kept a watchful eye on the growing concerns for players emails/dm’s and the growing cases of confirmed cases in the State of Georgia and it is at the point that it would be irresponsible as not only a FGC event organizer, but as a generally caring person we couldn’t continue to have this event ran as scheduled. It’s bad right now in our city and schools have been suspended indefinitely until this thing clears up. All professional sports have been canceled throughout the USA and most events with moderate/larger gatherings have been canceled in the city of Atlanta.
Final Round ability to function has always been from the revenue of the entry fee’s along with sponsorship. The old saying the tournament has to pay for itself. With the COVID-19 outbreak many sponsors that were either signed up or in negotiations with being apart of FR2020 pulled out. We have a cut off date for refunds (feb 29, 2020) because the administrative cost must be paid throughout the upcoming months/weeks prior to the event for it to function. Multiple deposits for the venue, all the games + DLC, badges, 2000 doctor mask, electricity, internet, badges/lanyards, tons of cleaning supplies and disposable gloves are all things that were paid for prior to today and are unfortunately non- refundable. Obviously the cleaning supplies/mask/gloves were a last minute addition to help protect our attendee’s, but with the rapid spread of COVID-19 in our area those things will not be enough to safely have the event. We would never touch the game fee money at any cost because that’s never been an option, but the venue fee is vital to the event being able to be run. We aren’t going to run away the night with everyone money like other events have done in the past, but we do not have the ability to give full refunds due to administrative cost talked about earlier in this post.
This is the smallest FR in attendance/competitors since we were at the Buford highway venue. Maybe it was the lack of being on a lot of the tours we are normally apart of (which is another story) or cancelations of tours/exhibits or maybe it was because of the COVID-19 virus because we normally have a huge push in the last two weeks of registration, but that didn’t happen this year. We appreciate the Sponsors that stuck with us to the very end and even those that pulled out earlier due to the COVID-19 outbreak. Thank you for choosing to be apart of FR2020. We wish you good luck in all your future tours! We wish things could be different, but we understand why things happened the way that they did as this was an uncontrollable situation. We normally don’t give refunds after the cut off date, but this is a different situation. I understand and seen the dm’s/emails. As of now the remainder of the money is going to be used to refund attendee’s and vendors. Attendees will receive their game fee per game + 43% of your venue fee’s. We will contact the vendors via email for your refunds.
Another option we were exploring was to give the game fee refund and offer a rain check for a future FR event. At this moment I feel like I should give back what I can and if people choose to attend another FR event that will be by choice and not because it’s owed to them. I will be spending today and all of tomorrow to complete all transactions. For everyone that planned to attend FR2020 I’m sorry I had to cancel the event. I canceled FR2020 for the safety of our staff/volunteers/attendees to the potential of getting contaminated and transmit COVID-19 back to your home area. With it being a week before the event this is very short notice so we are doing the best we can to get things handled. We didn’t want to wait until the day before the event and cancel because there’s no telling how bad it will be a week from now! I hope you understand why I had to cancel the event and thank you for the support throughout the 23 years I’ve been running tournaments.