Sunday, September 3, 2023

What Does Happen at GenCon?

 As most of us know, GenCon was last month in Indianapolis.  According to the press releases, there were 70,000 unique attendees this year (each attending 1+ days).  

At some point afterwards, I found this posted on a Dungeon Crawl Classics group:  

Disclaimer:  I did not vet this list for any authenticity (and the poster on DCC said the same),  but if it's anywhere close to being right, it begs some questions.  

Tables usually max out at 6, so divide the tickets sold by that to get a lowball estimate of for total events run.  Considering GenCon themselves says there's 15-16,000 events over the weekend, including large wargames, massive tournaments, LARPS, and special events like Living Dungeon, we're looking at 40% of the unique events are RPGs.  

The other consideration might be event costs.  Event tickets could start at $2 for a quick 2 -hour sesion($4 for 4 hrs, and so on) up to $20+ for special events.  \
  1. Making an assumption that D&D means all editions of TSR/WotC D&D.  If pre-5e gets dumped in "Other RPGs" that number is even more insane.  
  2. If D&D is the 800-lb gorilla, Pathfinder is the monkey playing cymbals in the corner.  The only other game with more than a 5% share.  And Starfinder is not included and earns it's own 2% share and top 10 listing. 
  3. I saw a lot of DCC "funnels" posted on social media, not as many mid+-level or maybe an organized play.  
  4. Tales of the Valiant is Kobold Press’ rehack of D&D and the big release of the con.
  5. Old Gods of Appalachia is Monte Cooks new game.
  6. West End Star Wars has not been in print for 25+ years and cracks the top 15 all by itself.  The WotC and Asmodee/FFG/Edge edition (technically still licensed and "in-print")
  7. I'd expect more Savage World games (roughly 60 all weekend) with the normal internet chatter.  Then again, somebody has to go to Indy and actually run a game. 
  8. People come to Inday to play Hero?  Hero fans are engineers, accountants, and actuaries, so they can afford the trip. 
  9. "Other RPGs" cover more than a third of the tickets sold, but these games had between 1 and 35 tables all weekend.  
So, to put my wargamer hat on, Historicon had 571gaming events with timeslots (with most events 6 player minimum and a lot of tournaments, I'll eyeball it at 5,000 (free) game tickets.

I ran three games of Fistful of Lead, Mike Lung ran two, we saw and awesome table using it in the HAWKS room, and there was a spaceship game in the book as well.  Technically, we had around 1.5% of the games and a bit more over 1.5% of the tickets.    When you consider that publisher-organized events, third party organized play, and just the random dudes that want to run D&D, the amount of manpower, time, and effort for a role-playing game to get to the numbers presented is quite impressive.  

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