Con Report : GottaCon 2010
February 8th, 2010 Posted in bestsellers | No Comments »Finally back from GottaCon 2010 and having unpacked all our product, deposited the change and edited the products on the site, we’re exhausted and amused. This was our first year at GottaCon and it looks like we’ll be adding GottaCon to our Con circuit. In fact, considering how well it went, I’m debating if we should be looking at the conventions in Calgary for next year as well.
GottaCon definitely grew in size, with what seemed to be at times twice the number of people there this year. The board gaming section maxed out it’s 10 tables on Saturday quite often, and in fact, sometimes we over-flowed to other places. If anything, they were victims of their own success with there being insufficient space and planning for open gaming for us board gamers.
There were a ton of demo’s being run and 4 different tournaments, with Settlers of Catan drawing the most and our own Race for the Galaxy tournament coming in 3rd. We had 6 participants, which was a reasonable amount considering we requested a $5 entry fee.
Outside of us, there were a ton of other gaming going on. As always, the CCGs were the more numerous with the miniature gamers a close second. The RPG tables were constantly filled; with perhaps the Computer Gaming section being the barest of them all.
Still, all that said, there were a few hiccups. We made a loss this year, not unexpected of course. Frankly, most cons we are viewing as a marketing expense - we do sell games, but the cost of being at the Con (especially if its outside of Vancouver) is quite high. A rough calculation that I did in my head came up to about $1,000 for GottaCon.
We also need to work out a better shelving option (our current shelves are just too big to transport well) and a better idea of what games to bring to conventions. As always, we over-packed with dozens of games never making it out of the box. Without shelving to put the games on, we couldn’t showcase them. And thus the games were there only if someone specifically asked for it.
On the other hand, we had a good dozen games that were asked for that we didn’t either bring enough copies of, or didn’t bring at all. So that’s a dozen sales lost. Finding a solution for both of these factors would make Cons better events for us.
