or, at least, £20 for KS supporters.
Sounds like a lot of money for a ticket. If this is non-profit, someone’s making a lot in costs.
What gives?
or, at least, £20 for KS supporters.
Sounds like a lot of money for a ticket. If this is non-profit, someone’s making a lot in costs.
What gives?
I haven’t looked at their budget, of course, but this does not sound at all unreasonable to me, for a multi-day conference held in central London. Speaker and venue costs could very easily account for that,** especially if they expect many of the people attending to have a cheaper kickstarter or concession ticket. And, as they say, last year they ran an event without ticketing and it was not ideal: lots of people got turned away at the door after having traveled to be there.
**I’ve been organizing events in this general vicinity for a couple of years now. I’ve taken several approaches to this, with donated or paid-for venues, volunteer or paid speakers, etc., but unless I’ve lucked into completely donated space and labor, about 5 pounds a head has typically been the cheapest I can make it run, and that’s for an event of a couple of hours without any printed goods and a minimum of supplied food/drink.
People were turned away last year because there was no in advance booking system. They could run 2018 at the same venue and either have people register in advance or charge a much more moderate entry fee than they’re now asking.
Sunday last year wasn’t nearly as busy, so a booking system would mean that more people would be allocated a Sunday slot and people wouldn’t be travelling there just to be turned away on the Saturday.
I’m not against a reasonable ticket fee as I understand there are necessary costs, but this year’s price seems a bit rich.
So how much are they paying speakers?
People were turned away because the venue had a limited capacity. The lack of a booking system meant people were turned away at the door, which sucked – but no pre-booking would have made the venue larger. I am sure that the new larger venue costs money, and I expect that they’ve set the price appropriately.
I’d say £20 (US$27) is reasonable for a smallish player-focused convention of this sort. I expect to pay $40-50 (advance price) for a small SF convention, really.
I should clarify what I mean by this. I’m not talking about a Comic-Con with celebrity actor guests.
I mean an event of 500-1500 people; guests are writers and fans; run by a non-profit; using hotel function space, with an attendance guarantee to the hotel; speakers are not paid (except that the guests of honor probably get comped hotel rooms).
This is not an exact analogy to AdvX, but it seems close.
(Smaller events – 250-ish – can be cheaper, but are not necessarily. Those events can scrounge space for cheap, but may have other fixed costs which bite harder due to the smaller size.)
(I am keenly interested in all of this stuff because we’re still looking at running a Boston IF event in 2019. More news when we have it…)
Yes, I agree. I think it should be £20 maximum.
Hi, I’m one of the organisers I’ll try and address your concerns as best I can here though I understand if you’re not happy about the change. We agonized about this. Sorry this is so long, but I want to try and be as open as possible. I feel we owe it.
- No one is making any money, in the early years I actually put a lot of my own money into the event. We have a non profit bank account and we run it as such.
As for Sci-fi cons, I suspect publishers sponsor guests? Our price is comparable to UK anime cons which only tend to have a max 3 special guests and are run outside of London All the rest of the events at those cons are run by attendees. I ran panels at those cons for many years and the most I get is £5-£10 off my ticket! I’d genuinely like to see how they manage to run at those costs!
I am fully prepared to admit we may have gotten this wrong, and totally understand if this is off-putting for you. I’m still looking into streaming/filming talks again this year, so I hope if you decide we’re no longer an event you’d like to support you can still see the speaker’s talks.
Again I’d like to repeat we are not for profit, would you consider at least removing the quotes from the post title? I totally get you have questions but you could have e-mailed or talked to us directly to ask them rather than post here, with the implication we’re misleading people. It’s fine to say if you think we’re overcharging but we’re not pocketing any money here.
I hope this explains our stance somewhat, any further questions I’d be glad to respond. I’ll post up the pie chart when we have that ready.
Hi @Azure, thanks for your detailed information.
I changed the title as requested; I don’t wish to cast aspersions on the organisers nor to appear negative about the Expo because i think it’s a really good event.
Please do follow up with more info and breakdown when you can. Also, if possible, consider rethinking the price structure; £20 seems fair to me. For example, if i had to pay £40, i would not attend, i can’t justify that cost. I realise there is a discount for KS backers but as yet we don’t know the minimum KS pledge.
Best of luck with the event.
The £20 KS pledge would be for a weekend pass. Thank you so much for editing the post. I’ll be back with more details when we can share them.
FWIW i think you’re running your expo business the wrong way round;
You should be charging the exhibitors, who are there to showcase and promote their commercial products rather than have the attendees bear all costs.
The opportunity for organisations to advertise their products has value that you’re not extracting (except possibly through KS pledges).
Generally, trade shows are free after registering and allow access to the expo floor, but also have a paid ticket tier which grants access to talks and events. I assume the model is that exhibitors cover venue costs and paid tier tickets cover speaker costs, or something similar.
My assumption would be that as AventureX scales up, it would eventually have to adopt a similar model.
We wouldn’t consider ourselves a trade show. We are open to both professional and non-profit/freeware creators. I’d consider it a curated exhibition. I wouldn’t even know how much to charge a freeware twine author to exhibit for example? Generally the few times a narrative game from a bigger dev or publisher has exhibited they offered to sponsor.
We don’t have a formal mission statement but our motivation is to bring people from all backgrounds together to share their love and knowledge of storytelling in games. A person making games in their spare time has as much right to attend as a full time pro dev whose company paid them to attend. Generally those most in need don’t always ask, and those in more secure position don’t always realise that’s where they are. We’d like both kinds of people there, not only because it makes a more interesting event…but because those secure full time devs can often open up paths for the ‘spare time’ folks looking to move into games full time. It does however make pricing difficult.
We would still have to ticket the expo hall as numbers are limited by fire safety. I would also not like to divide ticket types, as I said the point of the event is to get people talking to each other from different areas from fans, to devs ( both pro and hobby). I totally get what you’re saying though it’s something we considered, we’re keeping tabs on everything folks are saying to us and I’ve made sure to raise this thread with the other organisers.
You’re also right that this is a scaling up issue. TBH I think we’re hitting the limits of what we can run. I would like to see more events run of different scales in different countries. So again sorry if anything we do seems weird or offputting to you. What we’re trying to do is scale up without loosing ourselves. We’ll always listen and we’re happy to share what we’ve learnt with the community.
I’m pleased at the venue change and not overly put out by the ticketing.
I would think that most of the interested people who come year on year would be organised enough to buy the cheaper early ticket and consider it a fair trade off for avoiding the risk of being turned away at the door. If I wasn’t assisting an exhibitor, I wouldn’t have been able to get in on the Saturday last year (and indeed I felt rude for taking that opportunity when others couldn’t get in).
Not for the cons I attend. These are fannish endeavors.
I think there’s general business sponsorship, of the “put an ad the program book” variety. Publishers and local SF stores buy those. But it’s not the kind of industry show where the price is set by what companies are willing to budget. Most people go on their own nickel.
I too appreciate the detailed breakdown. Thanks!
Thanks, Azure.
£20 early on will work for me (I have to get to London anyway so it’s a drop in the… five drops or so) and I’m glad there are concessions. Also the British Library will be a lot handier for the Tube/Boris bikes.
Well, whad’ya know, all the “early bird” £20 tickets are sold out already. within just one day.
I made sure to post here first both in advance and when I went live. It’s worth noting that the tier above is only £10 more and comes with a Steam code, journal and pin badge. Please also remember that we’ll be selling some tickets through the British library which will be available at the following prices:
British Library Box Office (available from August)
Adult Weekend Pass: £40
Adult Day Pass: £25
Concession Weekend Pass: £10
Concession Day Pass: £6
I will once again emphasise no one is profiting off this event.
You’ve covered all your costs with KS in under 24 hours. after that it’s profit, no?