If you didn’t know, OpenChord is going to PAX East in Boston this month! From March 26th through the 28th, you can catch us in the Hynes Convention Center in Boston, Massachusetts, right across the aisle from the Boston Indie Showcase and behind the Nintendo booth! It’s pretty amazing, although the idea of being right next to one of the main events at PAX and behind one of the very top few companies in video games is a little bit daunting.. Oh, did I mention that EA is right across the aisle way too?
We’re very excited to be there, though! If you’re at PAX, come by and check us out – We’ll have 4 or 5 of our controllers hooked up to Frets on Fire with a whole heap of songs to play. We’ll be selling kits and taking orders for guitars as well, along with a few other little morsels. We’re looking into getting a few hundred OpenChord logo buttons made up, which we’ll be selling to raise money for charity, and we’ve also got a secret fun little project/bit o’ swag in the works that we’re really trying to get ready in time for PAX.
Speaking of charity, although we haven’t really publicized it before, OpenChord.org donates 10% of it’s profits to charity. As a tiny company without stockholders, bank loans, piles of venture capital money and obligations, we’re free to not be the most ruthless, quarterly-profit-maximizing company we could be. So we want to give back to the community and those in need, and so 10% of our profit goes straight to charity. Our ultimate plan is to give to a number of causes supporting both humanitarian causes and the open source community, but we figure we’ll concentrate on one charity at a time.
In light of us going to PAX, and, y’know, being a video game company, we figure it’s only appropriate to donate our 10% at this time to Penny Arcade’s own Child’s Play charity, which donates games to children’s hospitals and brightens the lives of countless ill children. So if you do choose to purchase one of our kits, know that not only will you have our most sincere thanks and appreciation, you’ll also be making life a little better for sick children (and if you’ve already bought a kit from us, you already have!)
