A few people have asked me recently about if they should try to sell at conventions, and what kinds of conventions are there, and how many are there and which are the big ones, the important ones, and the good ones. Those are big questions that are actually hard to answer, because it all depends on what your game is, what kind of customers you want, and what types of conventions and convention spots bring those two things together. So this isn’t a recommendation; rather it is a guide to understanding the con you’re considering, so you can answer those questions yourself.
In 1987 in an effort to get any kind of live music to come down to Texas, an independent music magazine in Austin called South By South West Music had a little festival. Now it’s one of the biggest brands in the world, and it attracts massive film companies and computer game companies to launch their new products, while also gluing on tech, capitalist/startup stuff, and “creatives”. Last year it went global and arrived in Sydney with an event so big nobody knew U2 and the Rolling Stones both launched albums at it.
The point is that “conventions” are big things, in the sense that they contain lots of ideas. Just as there are still small town musical festivals now, the original forms of gaming conventions haven’t gone away. And what it means is that there’s a whole array of conventions out there, and you need to know what kind of con you’re going to, if you’re keen to demo or sell your games. It can also be important to know what kind of convention the convention BEGAN as, because that will usually effect how it grows and how it identifies itself. The original conventions were wargaming based. Wargaming grew out of toy-soldier collectors who were used to all getting together in places and showing off their collections and these kinds of “collector conventions” also still exist, but they don’t have games. Wargaming cons still exist and often other conventions are built around them. Sometimes you’ll get ten wargamers still showing up for their important, yearly-scheduled events angry that the parking lot is filled with cosplayers…
Gaming and gamer are now nigh-meaningless terms, and cons find themselves trying to cater to a massively diverse crowd, sometimes with zero crossover. You might have six year old speed-cubers, chess, bridge or scrabble players from around the world holding tournaments, you might have CCG showdowns worth millions of dollars, cosplayers who spend all year building incredibly accurate tributes to an anime you’ve never heard of (but millions of people have), twitch stars, youtube celebrities, movie and TV celebrities, jedi sword practice, movie previews, arcade areas, crafting tutorials, JANOME selling sewing machines next to the sex fetish booths, strippers and burlesque, freeforms, LARPs with hundreds of people, boffer LARPs, juggalo matches, sword fighting demonstrations…PAX AUS even has a quiet corner for people who want to bring their own machines for LAN parties. And there’s a crazy con in NSW called IronCon which is for professional blacksmiths, collectors of weird old farming machines, steam punk cosplayers and medieval swordfighters.
I wouldn’t want to be a convention organiser and juggle all or even some of that. Most don’t do all of them, but knowing what they do and don’t cover and focus on will help you get your bearings. Broadly speaking, when it comes to games, cons at least start from two positions: as what I will call PLAY CONS and TRADE CONS.
Your play con starts because a bunch of people want to get together and play games. If this is wargames or CCGs, then you often have to have a lot of organising of the tournament, people might to pre-register their army lists or their deck lists, and there’s a lot of structure around who plays whom when. If it is board games there may be tournaments as well but there’s less need to organise quite so much. RPGs are in the middle: they need to typically have some timed sessions, if not all, and those need GMs to pre-register and provide a blurb to attract players. Play cons tend to be focused around these scheduled events which means that although they can have big open areas to play, they are often held in schools and similar places so everyone can run away to private rooms for their sessions. This has a knock-on effect of reducing how much space there is for “general milling” as I call it, and the trade floor. Even though they don’t focus on sales, these cons will still usually have some people selling something, especially as the costs to set up are often very low or free. Similarly game runners/demoers are often given space for free.
Trade cons arose out of just that: conventions where small businesses, designers or people across a trade gather to show off their ideas to buyers, who might be regular consumers or perhaps professionals in related fields or people looking to become investors or to start up franchises. In the case of games, you are generally selling games to the public, even if they are still in prototype stage or you are doing pre-promotion. Sometimes you are also testing things, and that is a kind of pre-promotion! The Mecca of game design is the con held at Essen each year called Spiel. It’s always been where the biggest european companies both reveal their new releases and test/preview what’s coming in the next few years. In these cons, the whole focus is the trade floor. There might not even be anything but the trade floor, or just lip service to things. Lip service being a key word: the bigger the trade con, the more it can spend on marketing and the more it wants to present itself as for all kinds of gamers. They can say they support the local industry; that doesn’t mean they do. And of course there are plenty of ways to do that! It’s not necessarily a convention’s duty to let local designers in free, especially when some of them might be vastly more wealthy than some guy operating out of his garage.
What this issue really comes down to is understanding or trying to get a sense of how the event makes its money, and how it spends money. Small, play focused cons often have volunteers, cheaper venues and lower costs as a result, and are generally run with the idea of recouping their costs mostly from attendees. Because they are smaller and – on the surface – aren’t focused on selling, they cannot attract Nintendo or Rio Grande or Hasbro, so they give great deals for people who want to demo games or run game stalls, or both. Whereas, primarily, the main way that conventions make money is from selling booths. There are “whale” packages they will sell to customers, but they aim to keep customer prices down and numbers high. Customers will push through a crowd and see it as a selling point – and indeed, it is a selling point for stall holders. But there’s only so much space to go around, so the prices for booths are set at a premium. In Australia, PAX booths are I think around $3-4000 for just a small one. Now PAX also has some wonderful cheaper options as well, for local designers. Just because their model is around selling booth space doesn’t mean they’re bad to go to for local designers.
The thing about booths on trade floors, though is you are competing against people who may have astronomically bigger budgets than you, to take up more floorspace, pull in more volunteers, have shinier banners. And that’s always going to happen: Booth Envy is real and it will hit you. Prepare for it. But remember that doesn’t mean they’re a bigger success than you, because they might have mortgaged their house to get that art and the booth space. Or they have some way to get stuff for free that you don’t, like they are a graphic artist or something. On the flip side, at a play con you might just have a table with one pull-up banner at the most. Some times even Trade Cons have strict rules about what you can and can’t have as trade dress in these kind of areas. This means you can be on a much more level footing. You and Hasbro are just the same package: a guy with handouts. Maybe you have sweets as well. But that’s a cheaper set up.
Now, in some cases you cannot sell games if you’re demoing, but this is more the case in Trade Cons. Because people have paid a premium to get booth space, you can’t get to demo or playtest in the design area and still make sales. Meanwhile, at a play con, you can probably sell anywhere you like, right there at the demo table even. They don’t even have to stand up and go over to your stall. Likewise trade cons might have rules about having people in the game library or freeplay area doing demos of your stuff, but there are ways to turn a trade con into a play con. Usually at trade cons I have volunteers running the hell out of my games in the RPG area, while I run the booth on the trade floor. That way I’m getting both types of customers.
Which brings us to another vector about cons: who are the customers? Again the kind of con will determine that. If they are aiming wide, they might get a lot of people who aren’t in your demographic which means even if there’s ten times the number of people walking past, you might be getting one tenth of the sales than at other cons. On the other hand, the ratio might indeed be more in your favour – it is okay if you get lower interest rates at cons crammed with people – and if your game is widely appealing you might desperately want access to less traditional markets. Likewise people in your demographic shop in different ways. A smaller con focused on play is full of people who might not be super-motivated to buy and in no mood to browse. But they might be in a huge mood to TEST, and they also have less things crying out to be spent on. How long do they come for? Play cons often run well into the night which means they have more time to sit down and try things. Big trade cons tend to sell a lot of one day tickets and offer too much stuff. Some cons really focus on families and kids run out of steam fast. Others focus on teens who have no budget.
And all of this then intersects with what kind of game you have. Is it long or short? Easy to teach or hard to pick up? What is the play count? Is it loud or soft? Does it attract attention when played and thrive under a crowd? Or does it find its best moments when in a quiet spot? Any of these games can go to any convention but it depends on how you present things. Blood on the Clocktower has been a huge financial success and never, ever had a booth at any convention I saw them at. Instead they focused on finding a quiet space to play for significant time periods, in organized games, because that is where that game thrives so much. They found a way to do that at every con they went to. When I designed Relics, it was much the same, it needed to be run for 2+ hours in the RPG area, but I also found ways that I could get into the demo/designer space and show Relics to folks walking buy. That rarely, if ever led to sales. So I went away and designed The Score, which takes literally ten minutes to play and is dead easy to learn and looks great on the table. That’s my “booth” game. Now it suits some booths more than others – it doesn’t sell itself on the art and heft alone. It works best IF I can get the demo, where I have a high conversion rate to sales. So it’s a game I want to have in a space people are walking slowly, and might spend five or ten minutes. So I probably wouldn’t try to sell it, as is, at a PAX booth. Relics looks mighty and chunky and that helps, but if I wanted to sell it, I would need my whole booth to look super DARK AND GOTHIC with black curtains and massive mockups of the tarot cards and maybe sell t-shirts and jewelry as well. Relics does sell okay in a demo, but at a Trade Con the people coming to play RPGs aren’t making a lot of sales, but those demo games lead to a good impression that often creates a sale LATER. If I was however selling it at a booth I would lean into its aesthetics and it would be about pulling walkers-by with the whole VIBE. of the game. Different cons require different strategies/games; and so do different areas at the con.
Know the con, know the space you’re in and the style of presentation that drives, and thus you’ll know what kind of customers you will get, and what kind of game to bring. Then and only then can you start to figure out the conversion rate of walkers-by to hearing-the-spiel, from spiel to demo and demo/spiel to sale. I do not know how to measure this very well for my own games, so I certainly cannot tell you what your metrics will look like for your games.
What I can say is having been taking product to conventions since 2017, we find it is the best money return on advertisement spent, because people at conventions are there to look at things you are showing them, and because nothing beats the personal touch. Sales ultimately is about building a relationship of trust with the customer. You are not there to lie to them or pressure them or confuse them or get them to buy something they don’t want. You are there to say “this is a thing that is cool and it might be your next favourite thing – and you can trust me that it does everything I say it does”. Everyone gets that they need to present their product as being interesting and cool and fulfilling a need but people often forget the last part of the pitch, that part about establishing trust. And this is best done in person but also? It is best done over time. The people who go to conventions tend to go back, and year after year, your sales continue to work on them. There is an old sales rule that people need seven “touches” – seven encounters of the product or its message before they become ready to consider a sale. Each of those touches is a reassurance to them that you are reliable and dependable, even if it’s just an illusion created by seeing the same advertisement over and over. You can get that effect by being at a convention over and over again, giving of yourself, giving away free stuff and prizes, running demos, contributing to the success of the event and to the happiness of people who pass by.
Which is the other thing about conventions: you’ll probably never make your money back on sales on the day. You might not even on sales down the road. But sales down the road are hard to know where they come from. For me though, they seem to come the most from conventions. Two, three, four years later, I’ll hear “oh we played that a few years ago and now we remembered to get it”. And for me, while I love a sale, I also love being remembered. It’s one thing to have someone enjoy your game, a huge thing for them to turn that into a sale, but to also have people remember you from years and years ago? To come back to see you again? That means you made an impression. Maybe even a subconscious one – buried until they see you again. That’s why I go to cons, I suppose: to turn playing my games into a sweet muscle memory for the players.
D-Constructions 