I Have Seen the Future...

[kevin_standlee]

...of SF conventions and fandom, and it frightens me. Any of you who think I'm a lunatic for trying to do anything I can to drive down the cost of Worldcons and that $200 is a bargain for what it provides (I know it is, but how do you prove that to anyone who isn't already an insider), go look at this Journal and this one for a glimpse of what people really want.

Among the tidbits: regarding the local 400-person SF con, currently costing (Canadian)$50 at the door, one person in particular said that the most s/he would consider reasonable for an SF convention of that size would be $15, tops. Maybe $7.50 for a single day.

Here's another particularly depressing post:

Basing a convention around bringing people together to chat won't work anymore. It was fine in the eighties, but we have the Internet now. I can get together to "share my fandom" with people in Panama, Poughkeepsie, or Paraguay for, essentially, free.

I'm not sure where the "potluck" analogy came from, but I don't care for it. Not because it's not an apt simile for Con-Version's vision, because it is. Rather, because potlucks only succeed when every attendee does an equal amount of work. I don't want to do work in order to go to a con. If I wanted to do work, I would join the concom. I pay $50 to have work done FOR me. I give you money; you show me things.

I hate to sound like I'm grousing about the younger generation, but if this is really what the next generation of would-be fandom thinks, We Are Doomed.

Comments

[querldox.livejournal.com]

San Diego's not corporate sponsored per se. Yes, there are some things, including the expenses of some of their "Special Guests" that are taken care of by companies, but I'm pretty sure that's a miniscule part of their budget.

On the other hand, what really serves as an extra income source for them is the Dealer's Room. I don't know offhand what the space rate is, but per scuttlebutt from people with spaces I believe it's considered on the high side...and they've got a *lot* of space. 52 aisles, each 100 yards long, spaces on both sides of each aisle. Some of it is the non-revenue generating Artists' Alley, but they're making a *lot* every year from that room.

However, people tend to forget in these days of 100,000+ attendance "Nerd Prom" that San Diego started out as a tiny little local comics con, drawing a few hundred folk. They didn't jump from 300 to 100,000 overnight, but fairly gradually grew. It didn't hurt that the location and timing, as well as the organization, got them a rep early on of being one of the best comics conventions, which is something that can feed on itself and lead to more industry types and general attendance showing up (see Boskone: The '80s or Minicon: The '90s).

[lagringa.livejournal.com]

This is correct. Most of San Diego Comic-Con is covered by attendee fees and Dealer Room stuff. And if San Diego - which is at least 40% literary these days - can afford to let people into a five day show for $65, a show that has now some of the best writing panels out there, because they are organized by Maryelizabeth Hart from Mysterious Galaxy - it's hard to justify WorldCons charging the ridiculous amounts of $$$ they charge. The other thing to keep in mind at San Diego Comic Con - which is a fan-run show with a handful of employees paid by the con committee - is that attending professionals get in for free. That means artists, creators, writers, anyone who can prove they have earned $$$ doing something related to comics, SF/F, writing, film or TV - gets in for free. Only the fans pay a fee to get in. This ensures that every year, more and more pros attend the con and agree to be on panels and do workshops, which means that every year the panels and workshops get bigger and better. I've always maintained that it is the best run show I've ever attended, media show or not.

I have suffered through some really painfully unorganized WorldCons, while gritting my teeth at the registration fee. I have also suffered through my share of excruciating media shows (any Wizard World-run show is pretty awful). Whatever the guys at San Diego Comic-Con have, I wish they;d bottle it and sell it to other con committees.

[querldox.livejournal.com]

Oh, there are some obvious things that allow San Diego to keep prices down. They're in the same city each year with substantial committee continuity (and for the last few years including paid staff continuity). They reached a point where they could afford/fit a convention center...and kept growing. As Kevin's pointed out in this thread, there's a cost discontinuity when you jump to convention center size...but then for a while after that, the incremental cost of each additional member is very low...and San Diego's now at the point where there are tens of thousands of members with very low incremental cost. Add the income from the Dealer's Room in, the surcharge on hotel rooms to pay for shuttle buses, and that really there aren't significant per-member costs at-con (i.e. at best a very unused pseudo-con suite).

I'd strongly argue that the program is not anywhere near 40% literary though. Even if you count comics as literary, a lot of that programming amounts to company promotion panels ("What's New in the DCU", "Spider-Man In the Next Year", etc.). They're also not immune to organizational problems. For the past several years, with last year reaching a peak, Pro Registration has had lines/delays on Wednesday that'd cause Worldcon Registration folk to be talked about for years after.

[lagringa.livejournal.com]

So perhaps it's time for WorldCon to start thinking of a single location? Like BEA did for a while in Chicago (which was awesome) before they started caving and moving it all over the place and thusly screwing things up.

Didn't Comic-Con used to mail pro-reg? i seem to remember that. I never had to stand in the pro line; I always got extra exhibitor badges for my staff and volunteers, even if it cost more. There's never a line for exhibitor badges, and we could have them sent to our hotel room.

But Comic-Con is going to have a problem soon; they had to cap their attendees for the first time last year. I think they've opened all the halls already too, so God only knows where they're going to get more space. There was talk of moving it but I can't imagine any place big enough to hold it at this point, except possibly McCormick Center in Chicago...but moving it would cos a drop in registration.

What does it cost to get into ReaderCon these days?

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

So perhaps it's time for WorldCon to start thinking of a single location?

The standard response to this question is, "Then it wouldn't be the Worldcon anymore." And I tend to agree.

There is no doubt that one of the contributing factors to the cost of a Worldcon membership is that every year's convention is a 5000-plus member one-shot startup. You could get rid of a bunch of the "overhead" cost, or at least amortize it over time, by doing exactly what Comicon and Dragon*Con have done: hire a few paid staff and run it in the same place every year.

Similarly, the Olympic Games could be made much cheaper to organize if you held them in the same city every four years, with a permanent organization, instead of making them gigantic one-shot events. (The "permanent organization" of the Olympics -- the International Olympic Committee -- doesn't actually operate the various Games. They just authorize local organizing committees to do so. There are a lot of analogies between Olympics and Worldcons.)

All of these things would make them cheaper. Would it make them better? I don't know if I have an answer for that.

For instance, if you happen to live in Southern California, you might say that "Holding the Worldcon in Anaheim every year would make it wonderful!" But would you feel that way if the permanent location was Boston? Or Glasgow? Or Japan, for that matter?

[bovil.livejournal.com]

Worldcon in one location would be like the World Series; a joke to the rest of the world, and something that is only accessable to top-tier enthusiasts (except for the folks for whom it was local).

[querldox.livejournal.com]

Comic-Con used to mail advance pro-reg badges. They stopped this a few years ago. There have been years since that they've literally been printing the badges on the spot as you show them your registration confirmation (which, to be blunt, is insane given the literally thousands of folk getting pro badges). Last year, according to what I heard later, they had a new contractor doing it and it reached ridiculous levels of slowness; I got in line around 4 and by 6 had moved only a few tens of feet and had a couple of hundred to go. I was fortunate a friend happened by who had an extra badge, which I used for Preview Night, coming back right near the close to get my own badge. If the same thing had happened at a Worldcon, people would still be talking about it decades later (i.e. it made the lines at ConFrancisco look reasonable).

As far as I know, there was no cap on Comic-Con attendees last year. At this point, it's more a problem of hotel space, since San Diego's under-hotelled, particularly in the immediate neighborhood, for the size of the convention center. Moving it to Chicago isn't an option; the majority of attendees are SoCal based, so you'd have to get a whole new mass audience. Not to mention losing the ability of Hollywood types to easily pop in for a promo panel, which is another reason for their large attendance. There apparently has been consideration of moving to Anaheim (or at least using said consideration when negotiating with the SD convention center), but that's as far as I can see them moving it. Remember, the concom is San Diego locals.

[jbriggs.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, the good old days when SDCC was a few hundred. I stopped going when it hit 10,000 (and moved to the new Convention Center). This year I'm going to Hawai'i that week, and its local for me.