Conventions All Report Record Attendance

All the main tabletop gaming conventions have announced record breaking attendance again this year. UK Games Expo had 21,700 unique attendees in June, Origins had 18,648 (interestingly not leapfrogging UKGE as it has the last few years), and Gen Con boasted "more than 60,000" unique attendees. Last year, it had 60,819, but they haven't given a precise figure this year. Here's the current chart of the four major tabletop conventions as it stands.

UKGE 2018

Convention	Unique Attendees	Turnstile	Exhibitors
Gen Con 2018	"over 60K"*	223,000	520+
Essen Spiel 2017	unknown	174,000	900+
UK Games Expo 2018	21,700	39,000	400+
Origins Game Fair 2018	18,648	70,765	300+
Pax Unplugged 2017	unknown	45,000	unknown

*Last year was 60,819

While Gen Con's 2018 figures are unclear, last year it has 60,817 unique attendees, 201,852 turnstile, and 500+ exhibitors. This year, it's attendance announcement says there was a record number of 4-day badge sales, +16% Saturday badges, and +60% Sunday badges.

Gen Con this year and last year expanded into the nearby Lucas Oil Stadium.

Essen Spiel comes later this year, at the end of October. It typically has a lower turnstile than Gen Con, and does not release unique attendees figures.

Turnstile includes multiple entries from the the same badge holder -- so if you have a four day badge and walk in and out of the convention hall 10 times in that period, you are counted 10 times for turnstile figures. Unique attendees, on the other hand, counts the number of individuals who purchased badges/tickets.

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).

Here's a look at Gen Con's attendance figures going all the way back to the 1970s. As can be seen, there's been meteoric growth since 2010. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

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[Koloth]

Weird; what happened 1995-2008? I know that AD&D was on the decline in the early 90s, and those were the bad Lorraine Williams years. But 3e came out ca. 2000, and I would have expected a boom then.

Somewhere in there was the .com economic downturn. Add in that D&D v2 was long in tooth and had a few years of poor of support due to TSR issues and you will probably find your answers.

I think it took WOTC a few years to convince the masses that D&D was back and would be properly supported and for that to translate to convention attendance growth.

 

[dragoner]

This also might have had something to do with it:

In 1976, Gen Con became the property of TSR, Inc., the gaming company co-founded by Gygax. TSR (and Gen Con) were acquired by Wizards of the Coast in 1997, which was subsequently acquired by Hasbro. Hasbro then sold Gen Con to the former CEO of Wizards of the Coast, Peter Adkison, in 2002. Gen Con spent a short time under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, due to a lawsuit brought against them by Lucasfilm in 2008. The organization emerged from bankruptcy protection a year later, while still holding its regularly scheduled events.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gen_Con

 

[SigmaOne]

"Turnstile" doesn't make a lot of sense for Gen Con, since there is no record of when you come and go. If you leave for lunch or don't, they won't know. They only track tickets for events, and security looks at your badge to make sure you belong. So unless they're doing some abstract counting of how many people enter and leave the ICC, they aren't doing that. If they count people with multiplicity for days, then the roughly 220k number makes a little more sense... For example, if there were 60k people who all had 4-day badges, that would amount to 240k. I don't know if the percentage of 4-day attendees is large enough for the ~220k turnstile to make sense for that kind of counting, though.

 

[bergec]

Gen Con's 2016 attendance was 60,819, not last year's. Last year, they never gave a more specific number than "approximate attendance of 60,000 unique attendees" to my knowledge.

 

[Eltab]

Let's face it, RPG'ing is way down on the list of Life's Needs (things like food, water, shelter top that list) but high on the list of Life's Wants. It's something you do with your surplus cash / time. So attendance can rise when many people are happy with their finances; attendance drops when people are uncertain or just cash-short.

Many people attending 'Cons is a good sign, and record-setting attendance is even more so.

 

[bayonetbrant]

Turnstile is so pointless. How many times someone goes outside the facility to eat or whatever?

"Turnstile" at Origins is the total number of attendees on any individual day, added together.

So if you buy a 5-day pass, you count 5 times in turnstile attendance.
If you buy a 2-day weekend pass, you only count twice.

If you buy a one-day pass and leave the building 6 different times for lunch, forgot something in your car, step outside for a phone call, etc you still only count once in the turnstile attendance.

There's no actual "turnstile" at any door anywhere at Origins to track how often people walk through the doors, there are just security folks checking at the door to make sure everyone's got badges on.

 

[Eric Rolston]

Update

I’ll see if I can dig up some attendance figures next time.

Edit - apparently they don’t give out those figures.

From http://denaghdesign.com/pax-unplugged-it/


UPDATE: [FONT=&quot]PAX Unplugged attendance was approximately 45,000, turnstile. I’m guessing that translates to about 30,000 unique attendees.[/FONT]

 

[ccs]

Somewhere in there was the .com economic downturn. Add in that D&D v2 was long in tooth and had a few years of poor of support due to TSR issues and you will probably find your answers.

2E only applies to 2k earlier. After that it's 3x. But I think you seriously overestimate D&Ds importance at '90s+ GCs....

Early 2ks (2h-2002) was the .com crash.
2001 also saw the 9/11 attacks.
I'm not sure wich of those had more impact on GC 2002, but that year it was real easy to get hotel rooms & deal on the prices.
2007-2009 the housing, credit & auto sectors tanked. Again, real easy to deal on prime hotel space.

I think it took WOTC a few years to convince the masses that D&D was back and would be properly supported and for that to translate to convention attendance growth.

I'm 100% certain that you overestimate D&Ds importance at modern GCs.

 

[Joerg Baumgartner]

Turnstile is so pointless. How many times someone goes outside the facility to eat or whatever? Really? Essen clearly started using that as some kind of weird measure once they saw Gen-Con attendance surpass theirs. Also explains why they don't want their ticket sales to be public.

Essen Spiel is held on a commercial fair area, in the middle of nowhere on the outskirts of Essen. You need an exhibitioner's day pass to walk in and out freely, your ordinary day pass or pass for several days allows you to enter once on a given day and to leave whenever you want.

Essen doesn't register names of attendants. To do so just for this kind of feedback would create quite a hassle with European data protection regulations.

And for all of Essen being open to the gaming public, it remains a commercial fair, not a convention. There are moderately big gaming conventions in Germany like the RPC in Cologne, or smaller regional ones with up to a few thousand attendants, and local ones with attendances in the mid hundreds in cities with a quarter of a million inhabitants (and a university student population of about 30k).

In addition to that, there are dedicated conventions with attendance numbers of up to a few hundred people where fans of just one segment of the market gather regularly.

Mega-events like

 

[Joe Pilkus]

Rough count from last year's PAX Unplugged put the unofficial number at 5,000 attendees, which was impressive for Philadelphia's 1st Con in quite a few decades.