Origins Up 11%; Maintains #4 Spot

Origins Game Fair has reported 20,000 unique attendees this year, which is an increase of 11% on last year. Last month, UK Games Expo reported an increase of 18% to 25,704 unique attendees. Turnstile was up 1% to 71,237. This cements UKGE and Origins as the #3 and #4 largest tabletop gaming conventions in the world respectively for the second year in a row.
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ConventionUnique AttendeesTurnstileExhibitors
Gen Con 2018"over 60K"223,000520+
Essen Spiel 2017unknown174,000900+
UK Games Expo 201925,70445,097430+
Origins Game Fair 201918,648[FONT=&quot]71,237[/FONT][FONT=&quot]257[/FONT]
Pax Unplugged 2017*unknown45,000unknown

*Claims to have doubled in 2018, but figures have not been published

"Turnstile" represents the number of people coming in and out, so somebody entering and leaving multiple times gets counted for each time.

Gen Con is in August, Essen Spiel will be in October. Conventions which don't focus exclusively on tabletop games tend to be bigger, especially those which include comic books (Italy's Lucca Comics & Games dwarfs all of these), but this chart is about specifically tabletop gaming conventions.
 

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Maybe we are in the beginning of a golden age for RPGs because the bubble of the videogame industry will burst relatively soon. More people want to play with the imagination and create their own fanart stories.
 

Origins changed the arrangement of registration and pre-registration lines and it flowed quicker and smoother than prior years.

The dealer's room seemed more crowded, definitely.
 



Maybe we are in the beginning of a golden age for RPGs because the bubble of the videogame industry will burst relatively soon. More people want to play with the imagination and create their own fanart stories.

A collapse of the video gaming industry seems unlikely to me - there might be a temporary drought of interesting titles due to the shift to the next console generation, but otherwise, it seems, video games do quite well (especially if we factor in mobile, too).
Still, I think the rather accessible 5th edition of D&D, in conjunction with the rise of streaming, crowdfunding of interesting indie titles and a bit of nostalgia seems to bring a lot of people old and new to TTRPGs.
 



HorusZA

Explorer
I dunno... Essen feels bigger than GenCon.
I suspect that there are way more day visitors at Essen so a larger percentage of the turnstile visitors would be unique.

Regardless, very happy to see that numbers are up across the board.
 

Jer

Legend
Supporter
Funny, it felt like more hemmed-in, with more congestion.

Which day? Thursday felt super cramped in the vendor hall this year, but the other three days I think it felt fine.

The same was true of last year too - Thursday was super busy. My impression is that there are a lot more folks who are showing up Thursday than in the past - it definitely feels like the traffic I used to expect to deal with on Fridays has shifted to Thursdays.

(Also the trend continues of vendors buying larger areas, which I noticed last year. I'm not surprised to hear that there were fewer vendors, though I thought part of the reason for larger booths was the distribution of some vendors into Halls C and A and out of the main Hall B area allowing for more vendors to buy larger booth spaces.)
 

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