View attachment 69861With Gen Con 2015 over, attendees can kick back their heels and reminisce about their awesome con experience. And it surely was for many people. But there were also con-goers who didn't have nearly as pleasant an experience, and it has to do with the ascension of geek culture and conventions' inability to keep up. At heart, conventions are geared for growth. It's a good thing, and convention companies work actively with hotels, restaurants, and exhibitors to ensure more and more people come to the convention. But what happens when a venue runs out of space?[h=3]Conventions Are Big Business[/h]Convention growth for Gen Con, San Diego Comic Con (SDCC) and New York Comic Con (NYCC) has reached stratospheric heights. The convention gatekeepers who put on these shows are delighted, as is the tourism industry and the surrounding service groups who help make these shows successful. According to Gen Con’s latest press release, they had their best year ever:
Gen Con 2015 has set an all-new attendance record with a unique attendance of 61,423 and a turnstile attendance of 197,695, creating a six-year span of record growth. Since 2010, Gen Con has more than doubled in attendance. Year-over-year, Gen Con has experienced 9% attendance growth, primarily driven by 4-Day and Family Fun Day badge sales. Gen Con also has raised more than $38,500 for the convention’s Official 2015 Charity, The Julian Center. Gen Con 2015 also was the first time that the convention held more than 400 exhibiting companies and sold out the retailer-and-educator-focused Trade Day.
Gen Con isn’t the only convention growing at massive rates, according to ICv2 columnist Rob Salowitz:
I recently saw some industry research from the online ticketing and events service Eventbrite, Inc. that sized the fandom events market at about $600M domestically in ticket sales alone. If that is accurate, that represents about 80% of the comic publication market all-up (periodical, digital and graphic novel), which ICv2 pegged at about 750M in 2012. The old joke about there being more people going to Cons than buying comics? Funny because it’s true. Those big numbers don’t include the revenues generated at the cons themselves for exhibitors, vendors and D-listers selling signed 8x10s, or the ripple effect that they have on restaurants, hotels, taxis and retailers in the host cities. The organizers of the New York Comic-Con estimate their 2013 show, which drew 130,000 people, had a $70M impact on the city. Even in the Big Apple, that ain’t chopped liver.
Salowitz returned to the topic again, citing a paper by Eventbrite that reviewed 962 events across the United States. Of that audience, 25% were game-related, 23% anime, 18% sci-fi/fantasy, and 18% comic book. Of the other miscellaneous role-play-type events, cosplay was 1% and LARPs were 0%. More startlingly is the growth of these events, which have been tracking annually at between 20% to 30%, with a current average of 25%. This is big money for event organizers: Salowitz estimates the entire fandom event economy could be worth nearly $3 billion in North America alone. The potential billions from conventions has not gone unnoticed. Washington Senator Steve Hobbs explained in his attempt to lure Gen Con to his state:
These conventions are an economic windfall to the host city’s restaurants, hotels, and to the city itself. There are even businesses that rely on these conventions for their main source of revenue. Hundreds and sometimes thousands of nerds bring disposable income to these conventions. They want to spend that income on the latest card games, board games, rule books, figures, hotel rooms, and of course food and drink. They drive from all parts of the state and even come from out of state to spend a three day weekend rolling dice, role playing, and forgetting their mundane jobs in some high tech company.
Of course, the success of these large cons hinges on their exclusivity. And that’s where the "conpocalypse" looms, somewhere between when die-hard fans stop attending the big cons and the smaller cons begin to surge in popularity. Larger cons become hopelessly mired in their chosen cities, lumbering institutions incapable of adapting to change. What's a con to do?
[lq]And that’s where the "conpocalypse" looms, somewhere between when die-hard fans stop attending the big cons and the smaller cons begin to surge in popularity.[/lq]
[h=3]What Will We Do When We Run Out of Space?[/h]After the housing system collapsed last year under the load of so many attendees trying to book a hotel, Gen Con took steps to revise their system...and that system involved a large amount of randomization. In short, all customers who purchased eligible badges were randomly entered into a queue and then given access to the Housing Portal, one at a time. Gen Con claimed that these changes would:
...distribute the high demand on the Housing Portal over approximately one-to-two hours, instead of a minute or two as in previous years. While the new process may take customers slightly longer, a personal countdown timer will tell your exact entry time to the Housing Portal on your "My Housing" page. Access to the portal does not guarantee a downtown hotel room, but is intended to more smoothly distribute rooms throughout the entire housing block to interested parties.
The wait time was considerably longer than two hours, with wait times extending past two hours and 40 minutes. Marty Walser vented his frustration at Raging Owlbear:
As it turns out, while Gen Con does get a fair sized housing block, the downtown hotels hold back a lot of their inventory for themselves. The Gen Con block sold out within about the first hour, and yet there was plenty of downtown availability outside of the housing block if you were willing to pay $600 - $800 per night. Yep, hotel rooms that generally go for around $150 to $200 were priced 4 times higher (or more!) than usual during Gen Con if you reserved outside of the block (inside block pricing is about $180 - $250 per night depending upon how nice the hotel is). They know that gamers desperate enough to be near the convention center will pay ridiculous amounts.
The strain was visible at Gen Con 2015, enough for Milon Griepp of ICv2 to notice:
While the crowd was generally good-natured and Gen Con and convention center employees did a good job of keeping behavior reasonable, a safer way of handling the opening of the hall would be to have a queuing area. But that would take space that is not available in a maxed out convention center. The ReedPOP pop culture show C2E2 uses interior space in the mammoth McCormack Center in Chicago for its queuing area. San Diego Comic-Con creates temporary queuing areas under tents outside for its 6,000-seat Hall H, at times the most popular spot at the convention, and lines sometimes extend beyond the tents for another half mile along the waterfront (not a bad place to wait). But neither of those options is really available in Indianapolis right now due to a lack of space inside and unpredictable summer weather outside. That’s just one symptom of broader stresses.
According to Griepp, the convention center is now at maximum capacity, breaking records with over 400 exhibitors and over 15,000 gaming events. It's not just Gen Con. At Comic Con, ad rates, hotel rates, and the cost of food have spiraled upward (in some places, ten times the rate) to take advantage of a captive audience.
[h=3]Welcome to the Lottery[/h]The end result is that despite pleas for larger footprints, more hotels, and more restaurants, cons can’t adjust quickly enough and have instead begun restricting the attendees through a variety of ways. Comic-Con and Gen Con both adopted a randomized lottery in 2015. The lottery approach to hotels was not well-received by Gen Con attendees:
Some liked this new process, however, randomized access resulted in some individuals getting the reservations that they wanted, while some did not get their preferred choices. Gen Con will continue to explore options on how to improve and modify the Housing Registration process in future years. In any scenario, rising demand for downtown housing is growing faster than the amount of available properties.
The problem with the randomization is that if you ended up at the tail end of the access, your hotel choices were already limited. Or to put it another way, hotels available at two hours and 40 minutes later were still available days later -- once you were past the two hour mark, the odds of getting a hotel in downtown were minuscule at best. The end result is that a loyal fan wasn't able to get a ticket or even a room no matter how hard they tried:
Lines may still be first-come-first-serve, but autographs, purchases of SDCC-exclusive collectibles, and even parking and finding a hotel are in some cases done through a lottery system. Attendees put their name in if they want a chance at getting something signed or buying a new item, and they find out later whether they won or lost. It results in disappointments — someone told me they lost six lotteries the other year when trying to get Guillermo del Toro to sign their Pacific Rim poster — but it removes lines and fights and opens attendees up to actually experience the Con.
ICv2 reported that the increasing battle for space has affected exhibitors at Gen Con as well:
For 2016, Gen Con took the controversial step of eliminating the on-site renewal option for companies with less than 30 “Priority Points,” the equivalent of three years of buying a 10’ x 10’ booth. Instead those companies will go into a different process in the fall, along with new companies that want to exhibit. This was causing considerable concern among newer companies who wanted to be sure they had a continuing presence at the show.
David Villegas at Gamer Nation Studios was one of those newer companies:
A single priority point is earned by paying $1200-$1800 for a single 10 foot by 10 foot booth. So, my company has 3. Others I know have less, a few have more. This represents a thinly veiled attempt to allow the largest vendors of the convention to book all the space they need or want, and leaves the indie publishers and small shops out until the cattle call that happens on-line, when hundreds of would be vendors will be seated at their computers furiously refreshing their computer screens to take the scraps that are left at the end or back of the exhibit hall in a mad rush that resembles the housing and event registration mayhem that also happens on-line and leaves hundreds of people screaming bloody murder each year. They get the last spaces if they are lucky enough to get in before the spots are sold out, of course.
Attendee and exhibitor tolerance may be a sliding scale depending on the age of the con-goer, with older con-goers unwilling to put up with some things that younger fans might tolerate; conversely, older con attendees tend to have more spending power and are willing to pay for premium access that the younger attendees might not be able to afford. The end result of democratization through lottery is that the established customers lose out. Fans may well be wondering if it’s all really worth it.
[lq]The end result of democratization through lottery is that the established customers lose out. Fans may well be wondering if it’s all really worth it.[/lq]
[h=3]Local Con Uprising[/h]
The answer seems to be smaller cons in more locations. Eventbrite’s latest survey indicates that fans prefer smaller, more general cons:
Given a choice between “fan events with a single focus (comics, games, sci-fi, Star Trek, Doctor Who, etc.)” and “fan events that cover the whole pop culture spectrum,” fans prefer more general pop culture shows by a margin of more than 2-1. 42% of fans surveyed say that shows between 10,000-50,000 are just right. 37% prefer smaller than 10,000, 20% prefer bigger shows.
Even Comic Con is feeling the pinch:
Part of the challenge to the cultural hegemony of Comic-Con is the rise of other events. The comic convention scene is booming. I was at Denver Comic Con and Phoenix Comicon earlier this summer, and both cracked 100,000 attendees, which would have been unfathomable just a few years ago.
So how are the big cons responding to the overcrowding? New York Comic Con convention organizer Reed Pop dealt with its overstuffed attendance of over 133,000 (which strains the limits of the Javits Center) by broadening the scope to include a week-long series of over 100 events called Super Week in 2015. Reed Pop is expanding its reach to comic book conventions in Paris, Australia, and India. They even host a smaller convention during the summer that focuses solely on comic books, Special Edition: New York.
Gen Con tried this tactic in the 80s, scaling back from Gen Con SoCal (the last was in 2006), Gen Con East (the last in 1982), and Gen Con South (the last was in 1984). But instead of expanding to other cons in other states, Gen Con is doubling down on Indianapolis by expanding in the city -- plans that were briefly derailed over Indiana's controversial RFRA amendment. Gen Con Senior Marketing Manager Jake Theis spoke to ICv2 about Gen Con's space challenges and their plans to address it:
In terms of potential space to grow, just seeing the amount of renovation that they’ve done to downtown Indianapolis, with Lucas Oil coming online and Georgia Street expansion, it seems that Indianapolis’ ability to find interesting new space in the downtown is something that they’re very terrific at.
By WTHR's estimate it will take four years before Gen Con will be able to expand convention space into Lucas Oil Stadium and other hotel spaces. Gen Con isn't the only convention dealing with a surge of popularity. Comic-Con has started hosting events outside the Convention Center, including the Central Library, located past Tailgate Park. Like Gen Con, Comic Con is also doubling down on San Diego, but it is not without controversy:
A new 406,000 square-foot, $520 million expansion to the center was to be contiguous – built next to the existing center on San Diego Bay. Convention officials have paid a pretty penny to private leaseholders of the public property since 2008 to secure that site – known as Fifth Avenue Landing. The project was going to be funded by a hotel tax, but that plan was struck down last year because it was approved only by a group of hoteliers, not the general public. Now another piece of the puzzle, approval from the Coastal Commission, is facing a legal challenge that will likely continue for four to five years. The project is now money-less and still legally troubled.
For some conventions, attendance is going up but hotel use isn't. One possible reason? Airbnb:
Although hard evidence of the cause has been difficult to pinpoint, a consensus is forming among industry professionals that it's the sharing economy -- in this case alternative lodging sites such as VRBO, FlipKey, Craig's List and, most significantly, the fast-growing Airbnb -- that are drawing attendees away from more traditional lodging offered by typical hotel room blocks.
Airbnb was originally created back in 2007 to accommodate conference attendees precisely because local hotels ran out of space. There are risks to using Airbnb of course:
Seasoned Airbnb guests might understand that they're taking on some risks by booking outside of the block, in a neighborhood that might be removed from host hotels. But if a conference officially partners with the site, other attendees might not be so savvy.
Be it Airbnb or some other arrangement with local hotels and convention space, the big cons are going to have to come up with new ways to accommodate attendee growth or risk losing them to smaller conventions. Salkowitz thinks attempts to grow in one city is becoming unsustainable, particularly as conventions in general increase in number:
Indianapolis is scheduled for not less than ten conventions this year, ranging from the recently-completed Indiana Comic-Con to the big tabletop gaming show Gen Con over the summer. This has local media concerned about oversaturation, and they might be right to be concerned. Even the hardest core fans only have so much money and so much shelf space. With the mainstreaming of geek culture, we’ve seen that even small markets can sustain a big show or two per year, but five, six, or ten? That’s starting to feel like a bubble.
Is it a bubble? With conventions locking themselves in for the long term (Gen Con until 2020, San Diego Comic Con until 2018) it seems these cons are going to find out just how dedicated their fan base really is over the next three years.
Mike "Talien" Tresca is a freelance game columnist, author, and communicator. You can follow him at Patreon.
Gen Con 2015 has set an all-new attendance record with a unique attendance of 61,423 and a turnstile attendance of 197,695, creating a six-year span of record growth. Since 2010, Gen Con has more than doubled in attendance. Year-over-year, Gen Con has experienced 9% attendance growth, primarily driven by 4-Day and Family Fun Day badge sales. Gen Con also has raised more than $38,500 for the convention’s Official 2015 Charity, The Julian Center. Gen Con 2015 also was the first time that the convention held more than 400 exhibiting companies and sold out the retailer-and-educator-focused Trade Day.
Gen Con isn’t the only convention growing at massive rates, according to ICv2 columnist Rob Salowitz:
I recently saw some industry research from the online ticketing and events service Eventbrite, Inc. that sized the fandom events market at about $600M domestically in ticket sales alone. If that is accurate, that represents about 80% of the comic publication market all-up (periodical, digital and graphic novel), which ICv2 pegged at about 750M in 2012. The old joke about there being more people going to Cons than buying comics? Funny because it’s true. Those big numbers don’t include the revenues generated at the cons themselves for exhibitors, vendors and D-listers selling signed 8x10s, or the ripple effect that they have on restaurants, hotels, taxis and retailers in the host cities. The organizers of the New York Comic-Con estimate their 2013 show, which drew 130,000 people, had a $70M impact on the city. Even in the Big Apple, that ain’t chopped liver.
Salowitz returned to the topic again, citing a paper by Eventbrite that reviewed 962 events across the United States. Of that audience, 25% were game-related, 23% anime, 18% sci-fi/fantasy, and 18% comic book. Of the other miscellaneous role-play-type events, cosplay was 1% and LARPs were 0%. More startlingly is the growth of these events, which have been tracking annually at between 20% to 30%, with a current average of 25%. This is big money for event organizers: Salowitz estimates the entire fandom event economy could be worth nearly $3 billion in North America alone. The potential billions from conventions has not gone unnoticed. Washington Senator Steve Hobbs explained in his attempt to lure Gen Con to his state:
These conventions are an economic windfall to the host city’s restaurants, hotels, and to the city itself. There are even businesses that rely on these conventions for their main source of revenue. Hundreds and sometimes thousands of nerds bring disposable income to these conventions. They want to spend that income on the latest card games, board games, rule books, figures, hotel rooms, and of course food and drink. They drive from all parts of the state and even come from out of state to spend a three day weekend rolling dice, role playing, and forgetting their mundane jobs in some high tech company.
Of course, the success of these large cons hinges on their exclusivity. And that’s where the "conpocalypse" looms, somewhere between when die-hard fans stop attending the big cons and the smaller cons begin to surge in popularity. Larger cons become hopelessly mired in their chosen cities, lumbering institutions incapable of adapting to change. What's a con to do?
[lq]And that’s where the "conpocalypse" looms, somewhere between when die-hard fans stop attending the big cons and the smaller cons begin to surge in popularity.[/lq]
[h=3]What Will We Do When We Run Out of Space?[/h]After the housing system collapsed last year under the load of so many attendees trying to book a hotel, Gen Con took steps to revise their system...and that system involved a large amount of randomization. In short, all customers who purchased eligible badges were randomly entered into a queue and then given access to the Housing Portal, one at a time. Gen Con claimed that these changes would:
...distribute the high demand on the Housing Portal over approximately one-to-two hours, instead of a minute or two as in previous years. While the new process may take customers slightly longer, a personal countdown timer will tell your exact entry time to the Housing Portal on your "My Housing" page. Access to the portal does not guarantee a downtown hotel room, but is intended to more smoothly distribute rooms throughout the entire housing block to interested parties.
The wait time was considerably longer than two hours, with wait times extending past two hours and 40 minutes. Marty Walser vented his frustration at Raging Owlbear:
As it turns out, while Gen Con does get a fair sized housing block, the downtown hotels hold back a lot of their inventory for themselves. The Gen Con block sold out within about the first hour, and yet there was plenty of downtown availability outside of the housing block if you were willing to pay $600 - $800 per night. Yep, hotel rooms that generally go for around $150 to $200 were priced 4 times higher (or more!) than usual during Gen Con if you reserved outside of the block (inside block pricing is about $180 - $250 per night depending upon how nice the hotel is). They know that gamers desperate enough to be near the convention center will pay ridiculous amounts.
The strain was visible at Gen Con 2015, enough for Milon Griepp of ICv2 to notice:
While the crowd was generally good-natured and Gen Con and convention center employees did a good job of keeping behavior reasonable, a safer way of handling the opening of the hall would be to have a queuing area. But that would take space that is not available in a maxed out convention center. The ReedPOP pop culture show C2E2 uses interior space in the mammoth McCormack Center in Chicago for its queuing area. San Diego Comic-Con creates temporary queuing areas under tents outside for its 6,000-seat Hall H, at times the most popular spot at the convention, and lines sometimes extend beyond the tents for another half mile along the waterfront (not a bad place to wait). But neither of those options is really available in Indianapolis right now due to a lack of space inside and unpredictable summer weather outside. That’s just one symptom of broader stresses.
According to Griepp, the convention center is now at maximum capacity, breaking records with over 400 exhibitors and over 15,000 gaming events. It's not just Gen Con. At Comic Con, ad rates, hotel rates, and the cost of food have spiraled upward (in some places, ten times the rate) to take advantage of a captive audience.
[h=3]Welcome to the Lottery[/h]The end result is that despite pleas for larger footprints, more hotels, and more restaurants, cons can’t adjust quickly enough and have instead begun restricting the attendees through a variety of ways. Comic-Con and Gen Con both adopted a randomized lottery in 2015. The lottery approach to hotels was not well-received by Gen Con attendees:
Some liked this new process, however, randomized access resulted in some individuals getting the reservations that they wanted, while some did not get their preferred choices. Gen Con will continue to explore options on how to improve and modify the Housing Registration process in future years. In any scenario, rising demand for downtown housing is growing faster than the amount of available properties.
The problem with the randomization is that if you ended up at the tail end of the access, your hotel choices were already limited. Or to put it another way, hotels available at two hours and 40 minutes later were still available days later -- once you were past the two hour mark, the odds of getting a hotel in downtown were minuscule at best. The end result is that a loyal fan wasn't able to get a ticket or even a room no matter how hard they tried:
Lines may still be first-come-first-serve, but autographs, purchases of SDCC-exclusive collectibles, and even parking and finding a hotel are in some cases done through a lottery system. Attendees put their name in if they want a chance at getting something signed or buying a new item, and they find out later whether they won or lost. It results in disappointments — someone told me they lost six lotteries the other year when trying to get Guillermo del Toro to sign their Pacific Rim poster — but it removes lines and fights and opens attendees up to actually experience the Con.
ICv2 reported that the increasing battle for space has affected exhibitors at Gen Con as well:
For 2016, Gen Con took the controversial step of eliminating the on-site renewal option for companies with less than 30 “Priority Points,” the equivalent of three years of buying a 10’ x 10’ booth. Instead those companies will go into a different process in the fall, along with new companies that want to exhibit. This was causing considerable concern among newer companies who wanted to be sure they had a continuing presence at the show.
David Villegas at Gamer Nation Studios was one of those newer companies:
A single priority point is earned by paying $1200-$1800 for a single 10 foot by 10 foot booth. So, my company has 3. Others I know have less, a few have more. This represents a thinly veiled attempt to allow the largest vendors of the convention to book all the space they need or want, and leaves the indie publishers and small shops out until the cattle call that happens on-line, when hundreds of would be vendors will be seated at their computers furiously refreshing their computer screens to take the scraps that are left at the end or back of the exhibit hall in a mad rush that resembles the housing and event registration mayhem that also happens on-line and leaves hundreds of people screaming bloody murder each year. They get the last spaces if they are lucky enough to get in before the spots are sold out, of course.
Attendee and exhibitor tolerance may be a sliding scale depending on the age of the con-goer, with older con-goers unwilling to put up with some things that younger fans might tolerate; conversely, older con attendees tend to have more spending power and are willing to pay for premium access that the younger attendees might not be able to afford. The end result of democratization through lottery is that the established customers lose out. Fans may well be wondering if it’s all really worth it.
[lq]The end result of democratization through lottery is that the established customers lose out. Fans may well be wondering if it’s all really worth it.[/lq]
[h=3]Local Con Uprising[/h]
The answer seems to be smaller cons in more locations. Eventbrite’s latest survey indicates that fans prefer smaller, more general cons:
Given a choice between “fan events with a single focus (comics, games, sci-fi, Star Trek, Doctor Who, etc.)” and “fan events that cover the whole pop culture spectrum,” fans prefer more general pop culture shows by a margin of more than 2-1. 42% of fans surveyed say that shows between 10,000-50,000 are just right. 37% prefer smaller than 10,000, 20% prefer bigger shows.
Even Comic Con is feeling the pinch:
Part of the challenge to the cultural hegemony of Comic-Con is the rise of other events. The comic convention scene is booming. I was at Denver Comic Con and Phoenix Comicon earlier this summer, and both cracked 100,000 attendees, which would have been unfathomable just a few years ago.
So how are the big cons responding to the overcrowding? New York Comic Con convention organizer Reed Pop dealt with its overstuffed attendance of over 133,000 (which strains the limits of the Javits Center) by broadening the scope to include a week-long series of over 100 events called Super Week in 2015. Reed Pop is expanding its reach to comic book conventions in Paris, Australia, and India. They even host a smaller convention during the summer that focuses solely on comic books, Special Edition: New York.
Gen Con tried this tactic in the 80s, scaling back from Gen Con SoCal (the last was in 2006), Gen Con East (the last in 1982), and Gen Con South (the last was in 1984). But instead of expanding to other cons in other states, Gen Con is doubling down on Indianapolis by expanding in the city -- plans that were briefly derailed over Indiana's controversial RFRA amendment. Gen Con Senior Marketing Manager Jake Theis spoke to ICv2 about Gen Con's space challenges and their plans to address it:
In terms of potential space to grow, just seeing the amount of renovation that they’ve done to downtown Indianapolis, with Lucas Oil coming online and Georgia Street expansion, it seems that Indianapolis’ ability to find interesting new space in the downtown is something that they’re very terrific at.
By WTHR's estimate it will take four years before Gen Con will be able to expand convention space into Lucas Oil Stadium and other hotel spaces. Gen Con isn't the only convention dealing with a surge of popularity. Comic-Con has started hosting events outside the Convention Center, including the Central Library, located past Tailgate Park. Like Gen Con, Comic Con is also doubling down on San Diego, but it is not without controversy:
A new 406,000 square-foot, $520 million expansion to the center was to be contiguous – built next to the existing center on San Diego Bay. Convention officials have paid a pretty penny to private leaseholders of the public property since 2008 to secure that site – known as Fifth Avenue Landing. The project was going to be funded by a hotel tax, but that plan was struck down last year because it was approved only by a group of hoteliers, not the general public. Now another piece of the puzzle, approval from the Coastal Commission, is facing a legal challenge that will likely continue for four to five years. The project is now money-less and still legally troubled.
For some conventions, attendance is going up but hotel use isn't. One possible reason? Airbnb:
Although hard evidence of the cause has been difficult to pinpoint, a consensus is forming among industry professionals that it's the sharing economy -- in this case alternative lodging sites such as VRBO, FlipKey, Craig's List and, most significantly, the fast-growing Airbnb -- that are drawing attendees away from more traditional lodging offered by typical hotel room blocks.
Airbnb was originally created back in 2007 to accommodate conference attendees precisely because local hotels ran out of space. There are risks to using Airbnb of course:
Seasoned Airbnb guests might understand that they're taking on some risks by booking outside of the block, in a neighborhood that might be removed from host hotels. But if a conference officially partners with the site, other attendees might not be so savvy.
Be it Airbnb or some other arrangement with local hotels and convention space, the big cons are going to have to come up with new ways to accommodate attendee growth or risk losing them to smaller conventions. Salkowitz thinks attempts to grow in one city is becoming unsustainable, particularly as conventions in general increase in number:
Indianapolis is scheduled for not less than ten conventions this year, ranging from the recently-completed Indiana Comic-Con to the big tabletop gaming show Gen Con over the summer. This has local media concerned about oversaturation, and they might be right to be concerned. Even the hardest core fans only have so much money and so much shelf space. With the mainstreaming of geek culture, we’ve seen that even small markets can sustain a big show or two per year, but five, six, or ten? That’s starting to feel like a bubble.
Is it a bubble? With conventions locking themselves in for the long term (Gen Con until 2020, San Diego Comic Con until 2018) it seems these cons are going to find out just how dedicated their fan base really is over the next three years.
Mike "Talien" Tresca is a freelance game columnist, author, and communicator. You can follow him at Patreon.
