Worldcon Size Dilemma

[kevin_standlee]

There are ways to make Worldcons less expensive and to make them have more "buzz" in the sense of making them much more crowded. Because Worldcons jumped up a size quanta, we are now too small for the pieces of convention centers we're obliged to rent. Part of this is because we really don't want to have to turn people away from the most-popular events. We could get away from that. If we were willing to accept, for instance, that not every member who wants to attend the Hugo Awards or the Masquerade will be guaranteed a seat, and if we were willing to accept a much higher level of crowding than I think most members would enjoy, we could make Worldcons more affordable by shoehorning too-large events into too-small-but-cheaper space. That's the gist of what I said in my latest reply to this discussion, in reply to George R.R. Martin's contention that Worldcons could easily fit back into cheap hotel space.

Comments

[howeird]

My suggestion was for a right-sized con. I was envisioning overflow rooms in the same building, probably the same floor, as the main event. Union labor? That's easily avoided by choosing the venue. Every con I've been to has had equipment like this in several of the larger halls, again it's something to be negotiated in the contract.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure you can "right-size" if "right-size" means "significantly reduce cost and nobody is ever denied seating at major events." The costs offset each other.

Here's something that may not be obvious: Some of the stuff that is done at, say, BayCon, doesn't scale proportionately. There are certain sizes of SF conventions that just don't work well. 2,000 is okay. 10,000 can work. 4,000 is very troublesome.

This is a generalization, of course. Sometimes you can find a relatively inexpensive facility. Winnipeg, for instance, was just about ideal for the size Worldcon that was held there. In retrospect, the convention membership could probably have been $30 cheaper. (But we didn't know it during the run-up, resulting in a post-con surplus that ConAdian only finished discharging this past year.) But I'm not convinced that there's a lot of price sensitivity between $200 and $170. Even though $160 is the inflation-adjusted equivalent of what I paid in 1984, I still think the price point is somewhere around $100. And to make that kind of change requires some really significant differences.

I'm not saying it can't be done. I'm saying it would be very difficult. And if a Worldcon made those changes without having told people while they were bidding what they planned to do, they'd take a large goodwill hit. But any bid that admitted to planning such changes would be vulnerable to competition that said, "We'll stick to a traditional Worldcon." The people who vote on where Worldcons are held are the people who are least sensitive to changes in its price. The conclusion should be obvious.