AvaCon is the group that arranged the Second Life™ Community Conventions. They provided the service to Linden Lab™ via a paid contractual arrangement. This year the contract terms were unacceptable to AvaCon. They are not saying what the deal buster was. Of course I haven’t heard anything out of Linden Lab either way.
Whether the Lab will retain another company, arrange the event in-house, or just forget it, we don’t know. But, it doesn’t look good. Someone will have to be hustling to arrange the convention.
Daniel Voyager apparently noticed the post on AvaCon’s blog. He has an article about it: SLCC 2012 Cancelled, which seems a bit overly pessimistic to me, but he may be right.
I am sure someone has a call into a contact within the Lab to see if they can get a statement. I don’t have those kinds of contacts within the Lab. I won’t give up all hope until I her something from a Lab spokesperson. I also won’t be betting against Daniel’s conclusion.
Of course another possibility is corporate brinkmanship…
Or… we know that the Lab has been falling behind on some of their projected schedules. The Market Place’s completion date has been rolled several times. So, those people being tied up with MP means they can’t move on to other projects. We know the Phase I Multi-Threaded Region Crossing spent months moving in and out of the release channels. The Advanced Creator Tools (Or Experience Tools) was rolled back from the release channel, so those people are still working on that project. Pathfinding the chaos created by the associated Havok update seems to be on schedule, but it is right at roll out.
Considering all these things, it may just be the Lindens are too busy trying to catch up to take for a convention.
Or may be they were all abducted by space aliens… or they are too busy reading 50 Shades of Grey…
I could continue speculating, but no matter how much I speculate we won’t know.