UPDATE: More recent turnstile figures for Gen Con have been provided, the landscape was redrawn as a result and once again we have a brand new top three!
Measuring the size of conventions is a fuzzy business as not all convention reports their attendance and those that do count and report in different ways. However, IcV2 reports Origins is up 11% and that takes turnstile attendance to 71, 237.
Turnstile attendance is the most commonly reported on metric, and it is used by the geeknative.com/conventions chart. You can see that below.
Public vote at Geek Native also has Origins more firmly rooted in the ‘tabletop games’ section of the conventions collection compared to Gen Con, which is sliding slightly towards ‘multi-genre’.
You can cast your own categrisation vote here.
The sources of trustworthy attendance numbers are also accessible via the same page, and these give Gen Con an equivalent attendance measurement of 61, 424. Of course, Gen Con 2019 is still to come, and if the conference reports figures and also shows an 11% growth, it will come close to overtaking Origins again.
The leading convention in the tabletop category is Essen Game Fair though that is dwarfed by conventions like Comiket and Lucca Comics & Games which both have more of a comics and book focus than a tabletop one.
Origins Award for Best Role-Playing Game
As Geek Native reported last week, Vampire: The Masquerade won Best Role-Playing Game at the Origins Award this year and becomes the only the second RPG to win the prestigious title twice.
Have you been to both Origins and Gen Con and had the chance to compare them? If so; would you recommend one over the other or are they both good in different ways?
GenCon 2018 had 223,326 “turnstile” attendees over the 4 days. The 60,000 is unique attendees.
The Origins number is their “turnstile” number over the 4 days.
https://www.ibj.com/articles/69971-gen-con-reports-record-attendance-for-downtown-gaming-bash
Ah, good find. I’ll get the stats updated! This aligns more with what we all thought was true.
Worth you looking into PAX Unplugged in Philadelphia. They reportedly had 45,000 over 2 days in 2017 and “doubled” in 2018.
http://denaghdesign.com/pax-unplugged-it/
http://www.tabletopwire.com/pax-unplugged-doubles-attendance-looks-toward-next-year/
That’s the second request for PAX Unplugged and I’d like to include them but just want a better source for the figures. It’s hard when Tabletopwire explicitly says PAX don’t report on figures as that casts the first/only unofficial measurement into doubt.