When I broke into the game industry 25 years ago, there were three fixed points on a publisher’s summer calendar: Origins Game Fair in early summer, GenCon in late summer and Dragon Con at the end of summer. If you were someone who aspired to be someone in the industry, as a publisher or designer or whatnot, you went to at least two of those three; all of them if possible. Even if you weren't exhibiting, you went to network, to hang out, to be seen.
Since then, each of these shows has had a different trajectory. GenCon, of course, has taken off like a rocket and now stands as the game industry’s answer to San Diego ComicCon: too big to be ignored, but in some ways also too big for its own good. DragonCon, after some wrangling that resulted in it severing ties with its founder, now brands itself as a pop culture convention and one could argue that it has yielded pride of place among gaming conventions to PAX Unplugged. Origins was the most venerable of the three and stayed true to its roots, but it has remained flat compared to GenCon.
Origins remains respected for its historical importance, especially among boardgamers and miniatures gamers. However, attendance has fluctuated a bit over the years; certainly it has failed to match GenCon’s growth over the same period of time. About 15 years ago, I inherited a bit of money that I could (and did) blow on travel, so I went to Origins. I very much enjoyed it — went to Dave Powell’s talks on the Chickamauga campaign, got to meet Frank Chadwick, Mark Walker and the Clash of Arms guys, did lunch at North Market, bought a bunch of games and had them shipped home from the FedEx conveniently located in the convention center… a good time, overall.
I rather liked Columbus, but perhaps that’s because the weather was so nice when I was there. Most places in the Midwest look pleasant and genteel when the weather holds up. I stayed in the Hyatt across the street from the Ohio State House, and so it was easy for me to check out the Civil War monument that James Thurber describes in his memoir, My Life and Hard Times. As a longtime Thurber fan, I also took the opportunity to visit the house that he describes in that book; it has been preserved as a museum to his life and work.
But back to Origins. As much as I enjoyed being there, what struck me most keenly was that it didn’t exactly fill the Columbus Convention Center. There halls and aisles were never crowded and there was just a lot of empty space. Apparently, that year, Origins claimed 10-11,000 visitors. But I have to think that that was the turnstile count; just from eyeballing it I guessed that there were about half as many unique visitors. In 2019 it drew an all-time high attendance of just over 20,000 (again, I’m guessing that’s turnstile count, not the number of individuals who attended).
The COVID lockdown forced cancellation of the 2020 show, of course. But BoardGameWire reported the other day that attendance has come back since then. This year, they claimed almost 18,000 visitors (again, I’m assuming this is turnstile count), which marks a sharp rebound from their 2021 post-COVID low.
Of course, this means that Origins still draws just a fraction of GenCon’s crowd — and probably a smaller fraction than 25 years ago. And I’ve heard that PAX Unplugged, despite being a very new show by comparison, outdrew Origins in its second year. Despite its long history, it still lags behind its peer competitors. It sounds like they’re trying to modernize the convention by broadening its scope beyond gaming into general nerd culture — this year, they got Adrian Paul, Kevin Sussman from “Big Bang Theory” and musician-songsmith Jonathan Coulton (of Portal fame) as guests. We’ll see how hard they push in this direction and how well it works. We have seen more and more bleed-over between gaming conventions and comics/general pop culture events over the past several years, so they’re already a bit behind the curve.
The meat of the article, however, discusses the costs and business risks that publishers incur these days by going to conventions. At Ramen Sandwich Press, we manage the risks by not putting up a fancy display, traveling light (it’s usually just me and a half-dozen boxes of merch thrown into the back of my car) and not too far from home, and not needing much display space. Bringing 10 copies of Book of Chance Meetings to a show is not as bulky or as expensive as bringing 10 copies of a typical boardgame. But even then, we have to weigh known risks versus uncertain rewards when we decide whether or not to do a show. I would love to do more shows farther from home and larger shows, but each convention, whether large or small, represents a gamble of our all too finite resources. It sounds like we’re not all that different from larger publishers in that respect.
The danger of this situation for Origins is that they fall into a sort of permanent middle ground, in which they are a small big convention — just large enough to make it expensive to set up shop there, but not so large as to guarantee a good return on your investment. They’ll have to keep growing attendance past their 2019 peak and pack out the Columbus Convention Center to get past that point.