An update on recent technical problems and more from the admin: https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/250292/on-technical-difficulties-mod-coverage-and-other-things/p1?new=1
Options
PAX East 2011 - How many attendees?
SpiderSimian
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Are there official numbers yet? Have not seen any posted anywhere. And I hear all kinds of numbers from 50,000 to 60,000 to even 70,000.
SpiderSimian on
0
Posts
Wiki said that Joystiq said that Robert Khoo said to Big Download that there were 69,500 people in attendance...
Prime 2010's numbers: 67,600
East 2010's numbers: 52,290
There are not many other areas where Pax could be held without over-saturating. Maybe a Pax Chicago because it is midwest and has a large population. Pax Austin Maybe, I'm not sure about the Texas gamer population though.
While I see the possibility of a UK PAX, I don't think we'll see it executed for at least a couple more years, if not longer.
However, there are a few conventions out there that do count actual people. Most of them are non-profit anime conventions. Thanks to them we are able to roughly estimate a more realistic attendance figure for all the other conventions, including PAX.
Here are the historical event statistics for Otakon. http://otakon.com/history_stats.asp I know for absolute fact that those numbers are a true count of actual attendees. Every badge is counted exactly once, and they only sell weekend passes. Otakon stopped offering one-day passes years ago. They also do not mail the badges, which sucks, but it means they know how exactly how many badges were picked up. If you pre-register and don't show up, you don't get counted in the attendance.
Otakon is an anime convention held annually in the Baltimore Convention Center. According to Wikipedia the Baltimore Convention Center is 1,225,000 square feet. The BCEC where PAX East took place is only 516,000 square feet. Otakon is perhaps the only event that utilizes every single square foot of the BCC, and it has a true attendance figure of 26,000+. If you counted turnstile, Otakon would be close to 90,000 people. It is much bigger than PAX. It's a madhouse, and it's awesome.
Also consider Anime Boston. Here are their figures. http://www.animeboston.com/about/history/ Anime Boston is held annually in the Hynes in Boston, where the first PAX East was held. It also uses the entire building. Anime Boston's latest attendance figure was 17,236. The first PAX East was, without a doubt, larger than Anime Boston. It pushed the Hynes to the limit. Anime Boston uses the entire building, but much more comfortably than did the first PAX East.
My estimate, based solely on 10+ years of convention experience, is that PAX East is over 20,000, but not by much. PAX East is definitely larger than Prime, but not by much. There was definitely excess space in the BCEC, so PAX East has room to grow. Prime doesn't really have much room without invading more hotel ballrooms.
Summary: PAX is big. Really big. It's definitely the biggest consumer gaming convention there is. Just don't go thinking it's bigger than it is. If you want to get a good idea for the size of a convention like PAX, do a Google Image search for the Rose Bowl stadium. It has a capacity over 90,000. Imagine it being %20-%25 full. That's PAX. It's really big.
I mean look at how long it took them to go from the first PAX Prime to the first PAX East. Doing any more than that right now would be too soon, and the quality of not just PAX East, but the new PAX and PAX Prime, would suffer greatly.
Now, I'll admit, I think having a PAX UK to go to would be awesome, but for me, that's more of a "week off work, $1300 to go, eating ramen and spam for a few months" sort of trip for me.
When I see a turnstile count of 69,500 for PAX East, I tend to think that the actual attendance number is somewhere between one third and one half - so IMO, the guesses of 25-30k seem fair.
I'm pretty sure that PAX East and Anime Boston were dead even in terms of actual attendance last year - AB was a comfier fit in the Hynes, but they also utilized most of the space in the Sheraton, and their greater diversity of programming meant fewer massive lines in the hallways during the day.
Anyway, a ton of people were at PAX East, enough to fill just about the entire lower bowl of Gillette Stadium. That's pretty damn amazing!
Still for comparison purposes if we are comparing this to other pax then we use the same scale for continuity sake. If we compare this to otakon then you may have to adjust one up or down.
This, pretty much.
I'd go with the number of passes for an attendance number, because the press, exhibitors, speakers, and VIPs will account for anyone who buys a pass and doesn't resell it/can't attend.
No, not this. There were not 69,500 badges. The BCEC could only fit 24,000 people per day and a majority of those were on 3-day badges, meaning that only counts as one person. The ACTUAL attendance is somewhere closer to 30,000 unique people throughout the weekend.
It is very safe to say that between 20,000 and 25,000 individual people attended PAX East this year, with no more than 24,000 of them being there on any one given day.
Turnstile counts can be very misleading. It's not PA's or Khoo's fault that the convention industry uses these fairly inflated numbers. But take, for example, a convention I help manage in Connecticut. Our total registrations are something like 7,000 people, most of them for three days (like PAX). If we count attendance the way PAX does, we have between 18,000 and 21,000 people, which is amazingly far, far higher than the maximum capacity of the convention center.
Turnstile works at conventions where they run for many, many days and the majority of the attendees only attend a single day. It breaks down rapidly at weekend fan conventions. MAGFest is a fairly tiny con. But it's four days. If they count turnstile, they basically get to multiply the number of all-con badges sold (most of them) by four to get an inflated attendance number.
No blame, just truth. There were definitely, absolutely, less than 30,000 people at PAX East.
With a convention like that open to the public, almost every single attendee is a single day attendee. Unless you are working the convention, there is no reason to go back. You buy a ticket, you walk around and see every car in a few hours, and you never come back. It's a nice one day outing. Therefore, if they count each person once each day, they actually get a very accurate count of unique persons seeing the show. The attendance figure of the show is ludicrously large, because they are counting people over nine days, but at any one given time, the show is far less crowded than PAX.
Since most conventions are just like the auto show, they all count this same way. Geek conventions are inherently different in that most people buy weekend passes, and there are events and things to do. It's not a day trip to see the expo hall and leave. It's a weekend party. But because of how the industry works, many of these conventions count attendees as per the industry standard where a weekend pass counts per day.
If anyone still doesn't believe it, look back at the Otakon example. It had 27,000 people and completely filled a space three times larger than the BCEC. How can PAX have more than 27,000 people in 1/3 the space? Also, consider this. The BCEC has 516,000 square feet. 516,000 divided by 69,500 is 7.4 square feet per person. Take out a ruler and measure 7.5 square feet. That is how much space you would have to yourself at PAX it would be so crowded, every hallway and room would be constantly and completely packed with only 7.4 feet of personal space per person.
I've seen this said a few times now. Just so you know, the 516k sq ft is only the expo floor space, that doesn't include any of the rest of the center. Just make sure you're comparing apples to apples. I really don't care about the argument at hand, but please make sure your numbers are accurate.
The 1200000 sq ft number they got from Wikipedia is TOTAL ENCLOSED SPACE, not usable space or expo space. The BCEC, on the other hand, does not quote a total enclosed space number.
The BCC has 300k sq ft of expo space (they say it on their own website) http://www.bccenter.org/floorplans.php?id=10
and the wikipedia article quotes it as well:
300,000 sq ft (25,000 m²). exhibit hall space
85,000 sq ft (7,900 m²). meeting room space
32,000 sq ft (3,000 m²). ballroom
The BCEC has:
500,000+ sq ft of expo space
160,000+ sq ft of meeting room space
40,000 sq ft ballroom
Now, Otakon has some space on the 2nd floor of the Hilton that's connected, but I doubt that makes up the entire difference between the two.
So, attendance numbers completely aside, the BCEC is definitively larger than the BCC.
Sorry to burst your bubble but the BCC has been nationaly known as the largest convention center in the East Coast, by a long shot. Heck when PAX East was forming that was their pitch to the people at Penny Arcade. The difference is that the BCEC is a more modern building since it was built later then the BCC. However unless you have actually been into the BCC, there is no chance the BCEC is bigger then the BCC, however if the supposed expansion gets off the ground that may change. As of right now as a person that has been to both venues the BCC is indeed bigger then the BCEC.
It's not a bubble. It's about usable space. I really don't care at a deep level or have any personal investment with either. Just compare apples to apples with actual numbers.
There are thousands of people in the lobbies at any given time throughout the convention. They couldn't fit 27,000 people into the convention center at a time if the lobbies weren't included (you need a badge to enter them), but said lobbies aren't counted as convention usable space by most people.
Having been to both centers, the BCC is larger than you'd think.
Just because I know you aren't looking:
1,103,538 square feet is the size of expo space in the west building alone of the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando. Maybe FL isn't the east coast... but still, real numbers.
No hating involved. Comparing the BCEC's floor space to the BCC's total enclosed building space simply wasn't a valid comparison. Also, saying something like "the BCC is the largest convention center on the east coast" when you could fit 5-6 of the BCC inside the combined space of the OCCC is also not a valid statement (unless it is the case that Orlando is not east coast...).
I probably shouldn't have said "definitively larger" without saying "definitively larger in usable space" since those were the numbers I was quoting.
Hey Rym - I think we met at the Tabletop area on Saturday, I had to leave when you guys started playing T&E. Anyways, that's not necessarily true. If you didn't have the partitioning walls up (which are entirely optional) between the food court, expo hall, and tabletop area, that'd definitely be able to fit 12,000 people or more. You just couldn't run an event because it's not arena-style.