How Much Gaming Took Place At Gen Con?

Kramodlog

Naked and living in a barrel

• Aug 6, 2015

• #2

A break down of the editions of D&D would have been interesting. Are there people who still play 3e and not 3.5?

 

C

ccooke

Adventurer

• Aug 6, 2015

• #3

Generally or at Gencon? One of the groups I'm in still runs 3.0e, and will continue to do so. Even though we've generally decided to shift to 5e, we all agreed that we wanted to have one 3.0e game running at all times.

 

Crothian

First Post

• Aug 6, 2015

• #4

Games on Demand is not a game system. It's odd they included it like that.

 

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WackyAnne

First Post

• Aug 6, 2015

• #5

I heard that while Pathfinder had the swankier room (great looking banners, too!) they also had a quite a few empty seats. And despite the problems that the D&D room & running had, they had at least 75 people waiting outside hoping in vain to get in to play (that specific number may come from an Epic, I'm not sure). It would be interesting to see a comparison of Seats Available to Seats Taken... Either way, I think both games are growing, which is a good thing for the industry overall...

 

A

Anthro78

Explorer

• Aug 6, 2015

• #6

WackyAnne said:

I heard that while Pathfinder had the swankier room (great looking banners, too!) they also had a quite a few empty seats. And despite the problems that the D&D room & running had, they had at least 75 people waiting outside hoping in vain to get in to play (that specific number may come from an Epic, I'm not sure). It would be interesting to see a comparison of Seats Available to Seats Taken... Either way, I think both games are growing, which is a good thing for the industry overall...

Click to expand...

While there were open slots for some games in the Sagamore, there also were a lot more tables available this year and even more players than ever. I think it's safe to say that PFS is still going strong and expanding.

 

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WackyAnne

First Post

• Aug 6, 2015

• #7

I just read most of that thread, and those numbers date to way back in May, even before registration went up. And it doesn't include events on generic tickets "ike Games on Demand, the D&D newbie sessions, and probably the same for Pathfinder and DCC"...

I know Pathfinder's given its final numbers a few weeks after the con in previous years, and I believe WotC/Baldman did the same last year for 5E; I would love to see the real player numbers...

 

P

Pauper

That guy, who does that thing.

• Aug 6, 2015

• #8

A couple of points:

- These are number of seats in the online reg book; there's no indication of how many of these seats were filled (though for the Big Two, total players might exceed seats in the reg book given both that few tickets likely went unused, plus the ability of players without specific game tickets to get into events with generic tickets, not to mention the possibility of adding GMs during the con to accommodate that extra demand).

- The 'seat-hours' list skews heavily in favor of Pathfinder, as Paizo offered few delve-style shorter events (just three by my count of the online catalog, at 9am Thursday, Friday, and Saturday), plus a number of 'Kids Track' events for younger players, while Baldman Games offered 1.5 hour Adventurers League modules all weekend long. Given that most players playing the longer 4 hour sessions likely signed up for more than one of them (PFS and AL players going to GenCon likely wanted to play as much PFS or AL as they could), it wouldn't surprise me if Baldman had about the same number of unique player IDs in their events as Paizo did, though it's hard to know that for certain.

 

Celebrim

Legend

• Aug 6, 2015

• #9

I'm surprised not to see tables for small and Indy games that are better suited to one off play. Are they all bundled up in 'Games on Demand' or where those just free tables for the taking? Heck, it would seem to me a con is a great time to break out older one shot games like Paranoia, Delta Green, Chill or Toon.

I'm very much interested in playing things like Dread, Fiasco, Life with Master, Eclipse Phase, Monsters and Other Childish Things, etc. without having to run it myself. Off the list, the only thing that would have really excited me would be Trail of Cthulhu.

I'm rather surprised how unexperimental that list is. Is it owed to logistic issues, like the are game publishers themselves largely responsible for paying to sponsor the games?

 

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mflayermonk

First Post

• Aug 7, 2015

• #10

A nice post, however, the most recent post on the thread is from May 17, 2015-something like 70 days before the con.