A few weeks ago, we exhibited at Emerald City Comicon. Typically when we attend conventions, we try to create some spectacle that captures people’s attention and sells games. Like the time we brought a marching band to PAX Australia.
At ECCC, we set up a “Pay What You Want” booth and encouraged people to give us any amount of money in exchange for our games. We put games on a table, set up some signs, stood off to the side, and waited to see what would happen.
We brought 2000 games. Before the convention began, we took bets on what would happen:
Tom thought we’d sell out in a few hours.
Alex thought we’d run out on the of the second day of the con.
Trin thought that we would not run out of games because we are no longer cool or relevant.
Jenn got a fever and didn’t know what was happening.
We were all wrong.
The doors opened, and attendees swarmed the booth. Within five minutes attendees realized they could just take games and walk away. A small group grabbed armfuls of free games and left, but most people paid something. Within an hour, the booth looked like this:
We ran out of games in 51 minutes.and made $8042.48, or 18.7% of the games’ retail value. In other words, we lost $685.44 per minute.
Attendees put lots of other stuff in the payment box too.
