No WotC At Gen Con This Year?

It looks like Wizards of the Coast will not be attending Gen Con this year. They've just posted a list of the conventions they'll be attending in 2016, and noted their intention to support conventions that they don't normally get to attend. "Gen Con is not on this list because we are changing things up to support more conventions and locations. Even though the Dungeons & Dragons team won’t be there we know our friends at Baldman Games will be hosting plenty of D&D adventures. It’s safe to say there will be ample opportunity to play Dungeons & Dragons during Gen Con. We’re excited to head to some new conventions this year and meet folks who don’t have the opportunity to travel to Indianapolis."

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The list of conventions WotC will be attending is Winter Fantasy (February, Fort Wayne, IN), Gary Con (March, Lake Geneva, WI), PAX East (April, Boston MA), Origins (June, Columbus OH), and PAX Prime (August, Seattle WA).

Chris Perkins will be hosting another Acquisitions Inc event at PAX East, and Origins will be the "D&D tabletop gaming event of the year" with sneak peeks and a return of the D&D Open. PAX Prime will have the highest concentration of D&D staff present.

Read more about their convention plans here.

 

[Mistwell]

The PAX shows are great, but when they even release attendance numbers, they release turnstile numbers. That means if you attend PAX East three days in a row, you get counted three times. If they report 70,000 visitors, it's really somewhere in the neighborhood of 23,000 unique visitors, and that's probably generous.

Gen Con did 61,423 unique visitors in 2015, with turnstile of 197,695. Gen Con is massive; While PAX Prime and PAX East are very big, they don't even come close.

That said, I agree with the rest of your post. As in past years, WotC will have huge amounts of actual play going on through the Adventurer's League at Gen Con. They don't really need to have a booth presence. Seems like they're focusing on growing their audience in other places, which is a good thing.

I don't know where you are getting your numbers. From what I have found, they don't release those numbers, and have not for several years. The last "estimate" I saw for PAX East 2015 is 30 to 40k unique visitors, but that was an unofficial estimate. Pax Prime's last official numbers were 70,000 in 2011. But neither is a confirmed number for 2015 from what I can tell, and it appears they stopped releasing such numbers in 2011 (though both conventions have grown a lot since 2011). I do know Pax Prime sells out in less than 1 hour all their passes, and is now the #1 convention for the State of Washington in terms of revenue conventions bring in.

 

[Klaus]

Winter Fantasy, Origins, etc. are, in my experience, far better environments to play D&D and speak with the R&D team than Gen Con--which I think is what you'd want from a D&D experience. At those conventions (especially Winter Fantasy) people are there to play D&D and go to D&D Q&A events. The R&D team are everywhere. In the hotel lobbies, at the local establishments. It's easy to have a casual, or even intense, conversation.

I think of Gen Con as an enormous block party, Winter Fantasy as a game night with friends, and Origins as a medium-sized party with amazing food (NORTH. MARKET!!!) and a just enough of everything I love, with space and time to enjoy it.

All well and good. But for some folk it's hard to get to a convention, so they go to the biggest one in hopes of meeting everyone and getting all the new goodies.

"Some folk" includes "me".

 

[Umbran]

But WotC can a do a lot of valuable: Having a Q&A, previewing products, explaining the new SRD, allowing folks to see and a few members of the core team. That's good stuff that adds value and is not at all "fan service".

Previewing products? How much previewing do they need to do for a $50 adventure path? Previews are a tool when you are putting out a large volume of products, and you have to try to make sure fans know about all of them so they can pick and choose (and drive hype, so they drink as much as possible from the fire hose), or when the product you have has taken a *huge* investment of development resources (like, say, video games) such that you really have to drive purchases with hype to be successful. When you only do a couple products a year, and those products were built on modest budgets, this level of marketing probably isn't necessary.

In this day of The Internet, the con is a comparatively poor venue for disseminating information - only a few hundreds of people go to your panel, and they disseminate things by word of mouth? Why use that error-prone channel, when you can just put up a blog post on the internet that reaches thousands of people in a matter of minutes?

 

[Evenglare]

I guess Indy gencon really is indie now.

 

[jayoungr]

That sucks. GenCon is really starting to feel like Paizo territory, with their name plastered everywhere, and it looks like WOTC is content to let it be so.

 

[spongebob1138]

I didn't expect WOTC to be at Gen Con, as they had said last year it wasn't their focus anymore. Truth be told, it doesn't bother me. I had a terrible time trying to play D&D at Gen Con last year: it was noisy as hell, and I could hardly make out what my DM and other players were trying to say. I'm not even going to try and play any D&D at Gen Con this year, not unless the situation with the room/crowd was going to be different (which I'm sure it won't be).

 

[Olaf the Stout]

Looks to me a simple case of WotC figuring that most of the people going to Gen Con are already RPG players that know about D&D 5E and have generally decided one way or the other if they like the game or not.

Cons like PAX are going to have a lot more video gamers that WotC could try and convince to give D&D/RPGs in general a try. GaryCon would be about connecting with the 1E/2E D&D players and trying to get them to give 5E a go.

Even if WotC don't have a stall at GenCo, I hope they still have some people sitting on various panels. The existing fan base still like to hear about what WotC have to say about D&D's future and what may be in the pipeline.

 

[DLIMedia]

WotC doesn't have to be there. The small amount of new new customers they may get at GenCon is likely not worth the expense of a booth.

With their big events and their non-RPG focused audience, they can probably get a crapload more sales at places like PAX.

And Baldman Games covers D&D at GenCon better than WotC themselves can ever do.

 

[DM Howard]

I am totally fine with them not going to Gen Con, but then again I don't plan going to Gen Con again in the near future. That convention (for me) is so much better when you can get a walking distance hotel and my enjoyment level is not high enough to justify the outlay.

I was considering going to Origins and, now that WotC has said they will be there, it has cemented my choice. I feel a little bad for the international folks, but I don't quite understand the "not worth going because it's not big enough" point of view. A convention is as good as the content you attend there, not necessarily the size (proven for myself when I attended Gen Con 2015).

And Baldman Games covers D&D at GenCon better than WotC themselves can ever do.

Really? All the griping and horror stories I heard about Baldman Games' events at Gen Con 2015 made me glad I hadn't been able to snag a D&D Access Pass or whatever they call it I heard that there events ran terribly off schedule and the staff that were running the events were sub-par (not all of course).

 

[DLIMedia]

Really? All the griping and horror stories I heard about Baldman Games' events at Gen Con 2015 made me glad I hadn't been able to snag a D&D Access Pass or whatever they call it I heard that there events ran terribly off schedule and the staff that were running the events were sub-par (not all of course).

Well I didn't say they were perfect, but I seriously doubt WotC can do any better.

And the quality of DMs is really a crap shoot... It's a fact of life: some DMs just suck and there's nothing you can do about that.