lehane wrote:
Sorry, I must have misworded that paragraph. I was trying to say I did not know about gencon getting money from other sources cause I never researched it.Also my mention of depending on customer sales was in reference to the vendors not gencon. I can see no reason why the vendors would want to limit the number of customers.
Sorry about that...
There is actually an excellent reason why vendors would be interested in numbers of people attending.
First off, attendance will be limited. The potential customer base will be limited no matter what due to the cap in badge sales.
Secondly, being a vendor at Gen Con is very expensive. I speak from experience. Besides all of the costs already mentioned by mhayward you also have transportation for staff and goods, additional labor before, during, and after the show, meals, displays, prize support and giveaways, hotel costs and so on. For many vendors Gen Con is barely worth it financially, even if they make a "killing".
So say, for the sake of argument, you will have a limit of 60,000 attendees per day. That is all the badges there are, that is the biggest the pool of customers can get.
Say you are a gaming company that is selling gaming goodies. Say you have a very narrow margin between breaking even at Gen Con and losing money at Gen Con. You now have a big interest in the demographics of those 60,000 people.
If, again just for the sake of argument, 20% of those people aren't gamers. Your potential customer base is only 80% of the total attendees. maybe you can afford to come back to Gen Con next year.
If you bump that up to 30% for people who are nongamers you are now only looking at 70% of attendees as potential customers. Gen Con next year is starting to look questionable.
If that number gets up to 40%....you are staying home next year.
If you ever wonder why many gaming companies aren't looking at attending Gen Con has being mandatory any more- this is a big chunk of the reason.