Gen Con 2024: The view from the booths
BoardGameWire spoke to a string of publishers who ran booths at this year’s record-breaking Gen Con event, to get the inside track on highs, lows, opportunities and challenges at the show. Those responses were far more than we were able to use in our headline article – Gen Con celebrates record 71,000 attendance after event sells out for first time in history – so we’ve collected their views in their totality on this year’s event here.
Scott Morris, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer, Lucky Duck Games
Gen Con was excellent this year! Obviously, with the numbers posted, it was the biggest attendance yet, and it could be felt everywhere, not just the exhibitor hall, but all the other locations where events and activities were being held. It was crowded and busy, in good ways. From a publisher’s perspective, I feel that the logistics were handled very well this year. We had no issues with receiving our products, the handling of our pallets, or the onsite construction and hanging of banners, etc. Everyone was helpful, informative, and handled the work well. When this part of a show goes well, it makes a publisher’s life much easier onsite. The Gen Con staff made themselves available to us at any time we had a question, and despite being very busy onsite, they always made an effort to make us feel important, that we mattered, and that our concerns were being addressed. Kudos to the staff, as I can imagine it was a hectic week/weekend for them.
I would like to see more opportunities for health to be a priority. Having more hand sanitizer available at stations around the ICC could be beneficial. With many industry people attending SDCC the week before, there were a lot of concerns about health. There have been several social media posts where attendees shared that they have tested positive for Covid, and others are not feeling well. With back to back shows with large crowds it is almost inevitable that someone will become sick. More options for safety in this area would be welcomed.
Results wise, our sales were higher than last year, which, given that our games this year all had lower SRP’s than 2023′ main releases, is a tremendous sign. We also noticed that Thursday’s sales were higher than normal. In 2023, I strongly felt it was “the comeback show”. Many people we met at Gen Con 2023 were telling us that it was their first “big” show after the pandemic challenges. However, most publishers sold out of a lot of product by Saturday at Gen Con 2023.
I think this year many consumers rushed to line up for their games on Thursday, rather than risk waiting for weekend purchasing and finding publishers being out of stock. That results in Thursday being a great sales day (at least for us), as well as a lot of happy customers. We released Captain Obvious ($20 SRP), Nestlings ($40 SRP), Quartz the Dice Game ($25 SRP), and Tranquility the Ascent ($15 SRP) and all of them did extremely well. This is the most rewarding part of being a publisher; seeing our fan’s excitement and joy playing the games we work so hard to bring to them!
Roberto Di Meglio, Director of Production, Ares Games
Our impression of Gen Con was great – we had excellent sales (almost the same as our 2023 sales, which have been our best ever). Gamers are great, and our events and tables were full all the time. Our preview of Altay – Dawn of Civilization received great feedback, and the pre-release of the War of the Ring Card Game expansion, Fire & Swords, sold out quickly.
In general, as with most shows, it looks like players are really interested in “just released” games, hot off the press, promo items, and very good offers (such as bundles or deep-discounted games), while anything “in between” (games released a few months ago, games with moderate discounts) do not get much attention at all. Continuing lines (such as our Wings of Glory line) also do well, as new players find a good selection and staff who can give them good tips of what to buy to start playing, while “veterans” pick up items to complete their collections.
Most of the challenges have been from a logistical/organizational perspective. Why players have to wait hours in line to get a badge, when they could be sent out digitally as PDFs? Why the exclusive logistics supplier of the show (Fern) seems to be so overloaded with work that we had to wait many hours before we got our material for the booth, both when setting up and Sunday when dismantling?
On Wednesday, our booth walls were setup very late, and our crew had to work late hours to setup, and we had to finish on Thursday morning. On Sunday, we had to wait for more than three hours after the show closed to get our empties from the warehouse (pallets and cartons) and we finished work at 9.40pm – barely minutes before the hall closed, with the risk we had to resume work on Monday morning. I think there are definitely improvements possible – especially considering that these services do not come cheap at all.
Max Seidman, Game Designer, Resonym
This Gen Con was noticeably busier than previous Gen Cons. At previous shows our booth had long lulls, but this year’s Thursday felt like a Saturday. Attendees were just always excited to demo and as soon as we turned over one table, a new group showed up!
That said, Gen Con is the single most expensive thing we do all year. As an indie publisher, people rarely come to Gen Con looking to just shop our games. Instead, we have to introduce them to Resonym and show them how good our games are. This means that it takes much more time and space for us to sell a game than it does for a bigger publisher, and our sales are lower. Gen Con is great for connecting with fans and exposing them to our games, taking important meetings with other businesses we work with, and meeting with reviewers and content creators. But we view it as a marketing expense, not a great way to make money.
I don’t know how Gen Con can fix this, exactly. More opportunities to spotlight indie groups would be great, especially ones that don’t cost an arm and a leg. Just generally reducing the major costs (booth space, hotel, drayage, furniture, badges) would also be fantastic—booth costs look like they went up about 15% this year.
A specific request: In the past years Gen Con has started limiting the number of exhibitor badges we are allowed to buy to 4 per 10×10 booth. Maybe this is fine for big groups who are largely just selling out of their booths and don’t need tons of demoers, or have a lot of staff and can have them work the booth full time. But for us, we need 4 demo stations per 10×10 booth, and that means about 6 demoers (so that our booth helpers can take 1-2 days to explore the convention and not be chained to the booth the whole time). Gen Con was gracious enough to allow us to buy 4 extra badges this year, but I’m not quite sure why there needs to be a limit. It’d be even better if they gave 3-4 badges per 10×10 space instead of just two.
Debbie Moynihan, COO of Wise Wizard Games
We had an amazing Gen Con this year, our team was super awesome, it was crazy busy, and our sales were phenomenal. Several of our products sold out, with Star Trek Star Realms and Robot Quest Arena expansions being the most in demand. Thursday was our busiest day, which was unusual. Many publishers were dropping new releases on Thursday, and I think there was a massive influx of attendees on Thursday in direct correlation with the massive influx of new releases this year.
We had games from our new Wacky Wizard Games product line for the first time at Gen Con, including Star Realms Academy and Caution Signs, and we were thrilled that Caution Signs received a Best of Gen Con award from Gaming Trend. We celebrated the 10th Anniversary of Star Realms with our community at the Star Realms Legend Series, and gave out extended art Star Realms promo cards from our upcoming Star Realms 10th Anniversary Edition product. We love having the chance to spend time in person with our player community, and showing our games to new players.
The Gen Con team was super helpful with teardown, which is the toughest part of the show, after you have worked the entire show, and then need to pack everything up and get it out.
I would love it if GMs could get in an hour early so that they can come to the booth to get product before the crowds and also have a chance to walk around the show before they have to work for the day. Everyone works super hard at the Gen Con, and anyone with an exhibitor badge can get in a full two hours early. This is a massive benefit so that people working at Gen Con don’t have to wait in the crowds, and I feel that GMs also deserve this benefit.
Chad Elkins, 25th Century Games
Overall we had a great Gen Con. Even with the same size booth as last, our sales were up 20% this year over last making it our biggest yet. Seemed like the crowds were shifting purchases up further in the early part of the week versus Saturday this year. Usually Thursday and Saturday are the two biggest sales days, but this year we saw that Saturday shift up to Friday.
Our booth placement was actually a lot worse than last year. We still had a 10×20 end cap, but rather than the end cap being on a main walkway, it was an endcap created within the aisle which was just a pass through between two aisles only, and facing backwards to the back wall. In fact, we had so many people tell us they struggled to locate us even knowing the aisle number we were on. So it certainly wasn’t placement. We debuted more titles this year than previous, so that certainly helps. Overall the booth itself had the exact same set up with the sales area and two demo stations.
And yes, I think people who are there for four days are trying to do their shopping before Saturday and let the Saturday only badge holders roam the vendor hall that day. Some of it is absolutely fear of games running out, others might just be trying to avoid the big additional influx of folks into the hall on Saturday.
I think Gen Con can certainly get bigger with additional space. Creating more compartmentalization of shopping would be needed though. For example, putting all of the clothing vendors into a separate area or other niche segments. A bigger hall and more people with board games mixed with dice companies, RPGs, comics, clothing etc all being intermingled would just create more problems trying to navigate to get to all of the booths that interest you. Segmenting them together would certainly make traversing the crowds a bit easier I would think, from an attendee point of view.
Chris Cieslik, Asmadi Games
Generally, Gen Con sales were wild. Thursday was our highest one-day-sales at Gen Con ever (including past Fri/Sat), and we’d sold out of everything except pins by Saturday (most stuff gone Friday!). It was a crowd that was energized, happy, and up for purchasing stuff. Demos went real well, lot of engagement on our upcoming games (Innovation Ultimate, One Deck Dungeon: Relics of the Forge).
Positive stuff con-wise: Organization was clean, getting in and getting badges wasn’t so bad, the marshalling yard was busy but the lines moved.
Negative stuff con-wise: No air conditioning or heat-mitigation efforts on the part of the convention or the building *whatsoever* during load-in and load-out. It’s Indy in August, and frankly that is negligent and dangerous. We had multiple staff with dehydration and heat-stroke type symptoms despite consuming lots of water and Gatorade. It needs to be fixed, and it’s a black spot on the show.
If I had infinite inventory on hand Saturday would’ve been pretty huge too. I do think Thursday and Sunday only badges were significant this year, which is not usually the case.
No big differences in approach, we get better every year and our display was pretty sleek this year, so I was happy about that.
I do not think Gen Con can grow much beyond its current size. Not without a bigger venue, and I honestly don’t even know what that would *be*. Between the ICC and all the hotels and LucasOil, we use a tremendous amount of space!
The heat has been a problem for years – this year and last year have been some of the worst, and organizers rebuff complaints unfortunately. I will be discussing it at length with them again this year!
It is super hard [to calculate how many copies of games are needed]! We underestimated it here, and it’s particularly tough because we were selling older games mostly. We went through 240 copies of Good Puppers (10,000 total sold), which is years old at this point! Could’ve sold 320 almost certainly. You never know what hall traffic patterns are going to be like, ours was particularly favorable this year and we had a lot of folks visit the booth.
The risk is twofold – one, as you say, lots of storage space on-site. But aside from that is the difficulty and cost of getting games to and from the convention. Gen Con is quite unfriendly unfortunately in this regard, you’re not allowed to caravan product in as a group, you each have to bring your own truck or freight it directly to the venue (and pay $1/lb for their labor to bring it to your booth). That gets costly fast, and if you overestimate demand you can cost yourself a ton.
Anne-Marie DeWitt, Co-owner, Fireside Games
Q. What about the con and the way it was organised really worked for you?
Gen Con ran very smoothly for us this year. The online reregistration process reduced the time it took to reup, and not having the leave the booth to stand in line allowed me to attend to end of convention activities such as retailer sales and ad hoc meetings. Having all the fields pre-populated with last year’s information and making those fields editable eased the process as well. Also, being able to start load in Tuesday night helped with fatigue while setting up.
Q. What were any challenges?
One challenge, though not new, was the short duration to bring booth materials in through the Marshalling Yard. Thirty minutes isn’t nearly long enough to get everything in. Having 1 hour load-in times would reduce the number of times we need to run back to the Marshalling Yard.
Any other challenges are more specific to us and not a true issue with Gen Con. For example, getting help unloading and loading the UHaul is tricky for us. We only need the help for an hour or two at the beginning and end of the show, and we don’t want to tap our sales support or demo support because we’ve hired them specifically for those skill sets. We would rather they know they are valued for those skills and aren’t seen as accessible for just any need. We learned at the show of some possible avenues for help that we’ll be looking into next year.
Q. How could things be improved for publishers like yourselves next year?
Along with longer times to unload the UHaul, knowing what the most popular events, games, deals, and booth experiences are would be helpful. If attendees were surveyed and those results shared with the publishers, that could help us make data-driven changes year-over-year.
Ilya Ushakov, Incredible Dream
We had an incredible experience at Gen Con 2024. As a small, independent board game publisher with five growing titles, it was encouraging to see how Gen Con prioritizes the community. It’s evident in how they support not just the big names but also the smaller publishers in Entrepreneur Avenue, Artist & Author Alleys, and the Community Marketplaces. This commitment to fostering a vibrant and inclusive community means so much to us.
A challenge we faced this year was managing our presence between our booth and the 300+ game demo events we ran. This was another record-breaking year at Gen Con, so it was a lot to deal with just the four of us on-site. Thankfully, we had invaluable support from paid volunteers, but we also dealt with a shipment delay that almost left us without copies of Kinfire Delve: Callous’ Lab. This would have been a disaster since we were launching it at the show. Logistic challenges like these can have an outsized impact on small teams like ours, but we pulled together, called in help, pivoted, and somehow got it done.
Gen Con’s focus on events and community truly sets it apart, and the sales it generates for all vendors are a wonderful by-product. We were thrilled to see the enthusiastic response to our games, especially Kinfire Delve, which sold out within an hour each morning. For a small indie publisher, the unique exposure and engagement with the most passionate gamers is invaluable. We can’t wait to build on this momentum and continue bringing unique and diverse games to our wonderful community.
Julien Sharp, Country Manager, US, Asmodee
Asmodee is proud to have been a co-sponsor of Gen Con this year. Having a larger brand presence at the show was instrumental in our ability to be able to engage with fans who were eager to demo new titles and to be some of the first to play soon to be released game titles.
Having multiple touch points between Asmodee’s retail shop, organized play events, and demo tables allowed for us and our studio partners to authentically engage with fans, who certainly delivered energy and excitement as they played our games.”
While we do not disclose sales figures, we’re excited to share that our top selling games at Gen Con were The Mandalorian: Adventures, ALTERED, Forest Shuffle, Star Wars: Bounty Hunters, and Star Wars: Unlimited: Shadows of the Galaxy.
Nathan Thornton, Marketing Director, Keymaster Games
One of the things that strikes us about Gen Con is the wide variety of board gamers the convention attracts every year. There are people who know us, people who don’t, people who love our games and are looking for the next one, and people who are hearing about our games for the first time. That an event like Gen Con can speak just as fluently to heavy wargamers and family gamers with little kids makes it a fantastic fit for a company like Keymaster, which sits someplace in the middle.
Every year, there are more and more opportunities to get involved and do more. As a smallish organization, we’ve historically just focused on our booth and selling directly, but this year we’ve grown the team a bit and scheduled some events for the first time. The how-to-play events we scheduled for our game Harvest not only gave people an opportunity to learn the game by playing a full game of it, but also got more eyes on the game through the event catalogue and by our placement in Lucas Oil Stadium, away from the main expo floor. As we’re beginning to discuss our plans for Gen Con 2025, we’re considering what additional events we could fit into our schedule and novel ways to market our games and get them in the hands of more people.
And we love seeing more and more small publishers in the mix on the expo floor. Convention-goers come to see what’s new from the tried-and-true publishers they rely on, but are just as much looking for surprises and hidden gems that they can only see at Gen Con. For some people, that might have been something new from us (we announced our new Parks: Roll & Hike just two weeks before the convention, so it was a bit of a surprise for folks), and for many others it was offerings from small publishers, international publishers they might’ve been unfamiliar with, or off-the-radar previews of tomorrow’s hot games.
More and more every year, Gen Con is a celebration of every type of game for every type of gamer. It’s one of the few opportunities we have to see the people who play our games in person, to hear what they’re looking for from us, and to celebrate the spirit of gaming with 80k people who love it as much as we do.
Ryan Laukat, President, Red Raven Games
We had a very good Gen Con. It wasn’t our best-selling year because we didn’t have anything brand-new or especially hard to find, but sales were good. This year, we’re releasing more products than ever before, and we were wishing that we’d had a bigger booth to feature all of them. In addition to two standalone Sleeping Gods titles, we also released a new card game called Isle of Night.
In the next few months, we’ll also be releasing a card-tableau building game called Creature Caravan and the Arzium RPG. This is the first time we’ve released an RPG product and the initial reaction has been very positive. We ran RPG events at the show to introduce people to the game. The big challenge, of course, is standing out in a very crowded market.
We ran a launch event for Creature Caravan that had the highest attendance of any of our events ever. It was sold out at 120 tickets. We had planned this event hoping to sell Creature Caravan at the show. Unfortunately, production delays meant that we couldn’t sell it, but we were able to airship copies of the game for this event. It was a fantastic experience and we consider it a big success.
Jess Carrier, Marketing Manager, Thunderworks Games
As always, Gen Con is generally very well run and organized. Our only complaints are things like the calcified presence of the “big dogs” in the front of the hall, and the interminable wait to be able to load in or out. Especially out. We sent one of our team to gather the truck from the mustering yard before 2pm, but they did not release our vehicle to leave the yard until several hours after the hall close, so we had to sit around guarding our broken-down booth waiting to be able to load out, despite our booth location being literally right in front of the loading bay doors, so we were both inconvenienced and an inconvenience to others. We could have been out of the way within 30 minutes of the hall closing had we been allowed to do so.
Sales takeaways – we heard this from many other publishers, but there was an odd pattern of sales this year. We (and others) had our best opening day Thursday ever. Sales actually declined after that. Thursday>Friday>Saturday>Sunday. We think this is due to mostly seeing all 4-day badges, and very few single day or weekend passes. Typically we expect Saturday>Friday>Thursday>Sunday.
Events – we ran over 110 game events.
Hotels – we heard a LOT of guests complaining about the cancellation of their rooms, some with transportation and parking issues, and not feeling very safe downtown.
