Origins Reclaims #3 Biggest Tabletop Gaming Convention Spot

A couple of weeks ago, UK Games Expo overtook Origins Game Fair to become the world's third largest tabletop games convention. That a victory was short-lived, however, as Origins this week announced its latest unique visitor and turnstile figures, which put it back in third place again, relegating UKGE back down to fourth. The difference is very close, though - there's just 500 unique attendees in it, and both conventions seem to be growing right now (UKGE especially fast), so this leap frogging might occur for a while. Gen Con and Essen Spiel are, of course, 3-4 times the size of both.

Convention	Unique Attendees	Turnstile	Exhibitors
Gen Con	60,819	201,852	500+
Essen Spiel	unknown	174,000	900+
Origins Game Fair	17,001	58,595	200+
UK Games Expo	16,500	31,000	325

As mentioned in the previous article, 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 tabletop gaming conventions are growing fast!

 

[Queer Venger]

Having just gotten back, I can attest, it was a blast. The D&D Open was awesome and WotC had a strong prescence, and they gave a lot of swag away, (even met and chatted with Chris Perkins before one of his panels, and he signed all of my stuff, what a great guy)!

Baldman Games runs a tight operation, I never bought tickets and got into every game with generic tokens, the DM's (except for one) were high calibre storytellers; the game room was dedicated large hall with great noise level that was not so distracting.

For this reason alone Im avoiding GenCon, (having attended that beast for the last 3 years). Its way to f*Cking big, too crowded, too noisy, long lines for everything. Plus at Origins I found great hotel accommodations that cost me ¼ the price for what I paid at Gencon last year.

Yeah, smaller, less attended equated to more fun and a better gaming experience for me ;-)

 

[Jer]

Yeah, smaller, less attended equated to more fun and a better gaming experience for me ;-)

Yeah - this is why I don't really want Origins to get too much bigger. It's big enough that it attracts a lot of great people to GM events and a lot of great vendors to sell stuff. But its not so big that it overwhelms you. I think that Columbus could handle a much larger event, but I'm not sure I'd want to attend it. (And I'm not sure that GAMA could keep up with it to be honest - as an outside observer it seems like their organizational abilities are pretty stretched by Origins at the size that it's at right now. And if it gets much bigger it may break in nasty ways.)

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

The projected number I heard at Origins was 20,000. 17,000+ still isn’t bad, and I think is about a 2,000 bump from last year? Despite that, the pre-registration sign-in was much, much faster this year.

 

[Morrus]

The projected number I heard at Origins was 20,000. 17,000+ still isn’t bad, and I think is about a 2,000 bump from last year? Despite that, the pre-registration sign-in was much, much faster this year.

Last year was 15,480. So, yeah, about a 1,500 bump.

 

[Jer]

Despite that, the pre-registration sign-in was much, much faster this year.

I noticed that this year they had a couple more check-in stations and that they'd moved the materials pickup station around the corner. Which probably helped to keep the lines moving by giving people who only needed to pick up a badge and tickets a way out that didn't involve them accidentally unnecessarily standing in the materials pickup line taking up space.

Also - rumor had it that last year they had everything ready to go for pre-reg sign in, and then the Windows boxes set up to do the sign in all started doing a Windows update. Across the wireless network they had set up to only handle small amounts of data necessary for dealing with registration. By the time they got it all fixed the lines were huge and it took a while to clear the backlog. (That only explains the long lines on the first day, but I didn't notice long lines after that day, so it may be true).

They need a better way to handle on-site event registration now. That's where the long lines are now, and it would be great if they could figure out how to reduce those.

 

[Morrus]

Just found out Dragonmeet's figures, courtesy of Chris Birch. 2014 approx 800, 2015 approx 1400, 2016 approx 1600. Quite a gap between that and UKGE, but it's growing.

GaryCon had about 550 in 2012, but I don't know how much it has grown since.

I don't know what Winter Fantasy gets. Anyone know about Paizocon?

 

[Seule]

If you didn't like a DM from Baldman, please please please let him know, and why. He can only keep his DM quality high if he knows what's going on. He can also shuffle DMs to events that their talents suit if he has more info.

 

[Queer Venger]

Seule, I did, the organizer shrugged his shoulders, what was also odd, the DM for that event did not give out feedback sheets, every other DM did.

But it was only 1 DM, overall my experience was stellar

On a side note: my only gripe with Origins was their event registration, on the day of the pre-reg, their website crashed monumentally, it was an IT clusterf@wk

 

[sir_ollibolli]

What about the comic and gaming convention in Lucca? That one is also pretty big.