Worldcon: General thoughts

[jcfiala]

So, what did I generally think about the worldcon? I've had a few people ask me that.


My first thought is that it was too expensive. I had a good time, but I in no way had $200 worth of good times. Admittedly, it would have been cheaper if I'd bought it earlier, but although having five days of science fiction convention was fun, I don't think it's that much fun. Also, I shouldn't have bought my wife a five-day membership.

The convention was stuffed with what seemed to me to be 85% literary panels and events, and about 15% movie or book tie in, and I wouldn't be surprised if that 15% is a high estimate. Anime was mentioned in one panel that I saw, computer games not at all, and although there was a section set aside for Gaming and Roleplaying, it was very sparse, and some of the folks running games didn't know the games they were running very well. (There was a room showing anime during the convention, but it was in the party hotel rather than in the convention center, and I rarely saw more than a few people in it.) My wife had been interested in gaming during the convention until she ran into a game where ten turns went by in three hours.

The convention seemed to seriously skew to the older side of the fandom. I'm 38, and I felt that I was on the younger end of the spectrum. There were a few people younger than me, but it seemed to me that a large number of them were young teens brought along by family rather than folks attending under their own steam. In the middle of the convention I left to go attend my Anime meet up - where I was surrounded by 30-35 people usually *younger* than myself, some of who love science fiction and fantasy, but don't feel that they have to get it from books.

Denvention had, I was told, about 3,700 folks attending, pulled in from all over the world, costing about $200 per person. Nan Desu Kan, the Denver-area-anime convention, pulled in about 5,000 folks last year, at about $50 per person. During the same weekend as the Worldcon, Otakon in Baltimore had a 26,000 person convention.

There really seems to be a problem at worldcon. They restrict themselves to certain forms of SF, which restricts membership, which means that the membership fees have to be higher to support the size of the event. I think that with a concentrated effort to lower the barriers to attend - by increasing awareness of the event and making it more palatable to younger folks - then the attendance can rise sharply. And to accomplish this, I think the rate to attend needs to be slashed drastically. I knew of many folks here in Denver who would have loved to attend - but simply couldn't afford to pay $200 to attend the convention, or even the $85 to attend one day. Sure, Worldcon will lose money - it may lose money for several years - but once the attendance rises and you've got 8,000 to 10,000 people paying $50 a person, then you'll stop losing money, and we can stop having panels about the Graying of SF fandom.

I'm glad I went. I've always wondered about worldcons. I'm glad I was able to help out by volunteering. But I have real doubts if I'll attend any others - they really don't seem to be worth the hassle, but Otakon... I want to go to Otakon again.

Comments

[grifter-t-wolf.livejournal.com]

Coworker of mine was one of the organizers there, I really couldn't afford a con but it sounds like it was fun.

Worldcon The acadamy awards of sci fi

[iamcompubear.livejournal.com]

It is more a prestigous con then for the masses. Hens the high cost. This ia a business convention. Most of the people can write it off there taxes as a busness expenses. For me it was worth it. I got to spend some time with many of the Authors I knew. I got a chance to partisipate and get Ideas for some of my books. Most of all I made conections which should more then pay for my membership in the long run. Most people under 35 have not yet decided they want to be a serious writer so therefore the crowd is older. I admit Ive attened Worldcons for most of my life on and off. I knew quite a lot of people there. see my report later.

Interesting perspective

[http://openid.aol.com/JeriMerrell (from livejournal.com)]

I'm just a few years older than you but also noticed the age-skewing at Worldcon - as compared to the much younger age bracket represented at Norwescon, which had a full time gaming room and a fairly significant comic book and anime event and attendee representation.

And in re: your comment on convention pricing, Seattle's SakuraCon anime convention runs 3 days with a $45 day full membership and last year had 15,000 people in attendance. I realize Seattle is a slightly bigger metro area, but still, that's an illustration of your point. Both my teen sons could care less about Worldcon, one attended Norwescon but probably won't be back, but both scraped and saved for SakuraCon and their costumes.

Attendance and so forth

[petrea-mitchell.livejournal.com]

Hi, I found this report via the list at SF Signal.

The final attendance was about 3800, IIRC. This was unusually small for a North American Worldcon. If the economy hadn't tanked, it could easily have been closer to 5000.

It's tricky to compare attendance between conventions without knowing how they're counting. If you attend 5 days of Worldcon, you still count as one person; some conventions count you as a separate person for each day you attend.

As for restricting itself to certain types of sf, as a volunteer event, Worldcon is limited by what people are willing to volunteer to do. If a few people with deep knowledge of anime volunteer as program participants and have interesting suggestions for anime panels, then you get anime panels. (And I believe next year's Worldcon in Montreal is working with their local anime convention to try to get some people who can do anime panels to volunteer.)

It's a chicken-and-egg problem: anime fans don't attend general sf conventions because either there's no anime track or anime isn't part of the general conversation, and so no anime track develops and it stays separate.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

I think the rate to attend needs to be slashed drastically. I knew of many folks here in Denver who would have loved to attend - but simply couldn't afford to pay $200 to attend the convention, or even the $85 to attend one day. Sure, Worldcon will lose money - it may lose money for several years - but once the attendance rises and you've got 8,000 to 10,000 people paying $50 a person, then you'll stop losing money, and we can stop having panels about the Graying of SF fandom.

While I agree with your basic point about not wanting to chase the younger fans away, there is a practical problem with your proposal: Who pays for it. You say "Sure, Worldcon will lose money ... for several years." But every Worldcon is a separate, stand-alone organization. Nippon 2007 lost about $35,000, but D3 isn't responsible for N2007's debts. Anticipation is similarly responsible only for its own convention and neither its predecessor nor its successor. Each Worldcon is a giant one-shot convention, and must stand or fail on its own. This is one of the reasons it is so expensive.

How do you propose subsidizing a series of Worldcons, knowing that they'll all lose money? Who pays for it?

Another thing: You point out that NDK had about 5000 members @$50. That's $250,000. D3's 3700 members did not pay $200/person on the average -- don't confuse max with median -- but let's use that figure because you did. That's $740,000, which sounds about right to me based on how much it cost to run ConJose in 2002. In order to generate the same revenue at $50/head, you'd need nearly 15,000 members.

And you do need that much money, because given the stand-alone nature of your convention, you have to build everything up from scratch (then throw it away post-con), and you won't get long-term, repeat-customer pricing from your facilities. Figure on spending at least $250,000 just to rent the convention center, and that's before any other expense.

Worldcons are inherently pricey because of their structure. It's sort of like how incredibly expensive the Olympics are to stage, due to needing to build up lots of single-use structure. Short of plonking the event down in one place and making it a permanent fixture there, with the same group running it every time, I'm not sure how to reduce its price.

On top of all that, while reducing the price will certainly draw in more people from what I consider the "local" (commute distance) crowd, almost none of those people will be there next year because there's no way they're going to go to Montreal or Melbourne -- or even Reno or Seattle, for that matter. Those people are so price-sensitive that their membership cost represents the vast majority of what they're paying to attend the convention, whereas for the people who have to fly from elsewhere, the membership is only a relatively minor part of the cost.

What we need is a kind of differential pricing that wouldn't cause more harm than good. I've toyed with various things, such as "half price if under 25 years old" or something like that, but the political ramifications among the regular attendees are dire. And those regular attendees are the people who vote on where to hold the convention, so don't expect to see many radical changes soon.

[jcfiala.livejournal.com]

So, $740,000 to hold a Worldcon downtown...

But what if you hadn't had it downtown? Say, the Tech center, where NDK runs on less money because they're not downtown. If a 5,000 person convention fits in the Tech Center, why wouldn't a 4,000 person convention fit there? Heck, split it between the Marriot and the Hyatt - younger folks could walk between the two hotels, and an easy shuttle could send people back and forth.

What if a Worldcon didn't require so much money?

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

What if a Worldcon didn't require so much money?

Then of course we'd lower the price. Worldcons' memberships aren't priced to make a profit; they're priced to pay for the event with a small amount of reserve. (ConJose, the 2002 Worldcon, had a net surplus after expenses of around 3% of gross revenue, that gross being just short of $1 million.)

I am unfamiliar with the Tech Center, so I can't speak to specifics. It comes down to "what do you cut." Worldcons accumulated a lot of features over time, and it's difficult to remove any of them. Some of those features are very expensive, in terms of time, space, and people points.

And here's a key thing -- if you cut the wrong things, then a whole lot of the people who have been attending will see no need to come. Sure, you might draw 5,000 people who all live within a two-hour drive/commute of the city, but most of the people who travel from around the world will stop attending. Is that a net win or not?

[jcfiala.livejournal.com]

Well, which features are we talking about?

A large area for the ceremony/masquerade? We'd have that.
A lot of rooms for having room parties in? We'd have that.
A large space for dealers and art show? Yeah, we could fit that in.
Many event rooms to hold panels in? We'd have that.
Rooms to display films in? We'd have that.
Lower cost hotel rooms? We'd have that.
Lower cost parking? We'd have that.

I've only been to one worldcon. What's different between that and a region convention - other than size - which we might lose out on by not holding it downtown?

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

I'm still not convinced that it's actually just the location. There's something else going on, almost certainly. I don't have the internal details of NDK, nor do I know where they get all of their money and where all of their expenses are. I can't address your specific question without specific knowledge of the venues that I'm not in a position to obtain.

For instance, how much is their venue charging them per year? How much would they charge if it was only a one-shot event? I'm pretty certain that FanimeCon (which uses the same space as did the 2002 Worldcon) is being charged substantially less per year than we were for ConJose becuase they are long-term repeat business. That's a downtown venue, and FanimeCon can charge its members a lot less per person (they also draw more people). The event is also shorter, which reduces cost. Would people be happier if we said, "We'll charge 20% less for your Worldcon membership -- but the con will be only four days long, not five, and we really mean 3 1/2 days because the more typical slop on the ends will go away as well.

(What I'm saying is it's not just the cost per membership you have to consider but the cost per unit time. Worldcons are still more expensive, though -- usually about twice the cost of other SF genre conventions per hour of convention total run.)

Also, what other sources of income does NDK have? Roughly 80% of a Worldcon's total cost is covered by memberships. Dealers aren't really charged very much for their space compared to, say, a trade show. Artist hanging fees and commissions aren't really that high when you look at the big picture. To some extent, that's intentional, because we as conrunners want some of those dealers and artists who otherwise wouldn't be able to afford the Big Bucks. It's likely that the income from those areas doesn't even cover the cost of renting the space in which it's held. I don't know if that's true of other conventions like NDK or FanimeCon, because I don't know how much they charge their dealers and exhibitors.

The main difference from a functional point of view between a Worldcon and a typical regional SF convention is size. Once you grow past a certain size, you can't fit into hotels anymore. There's nothing implicit in being downtown -- it's just that it's usually where the big convention space is located.

[jcfiala.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Well, it's true - I don't have the Denvention information, and I don't have the NDK information, beyond what I've written, so I suppose we can't go farther on this.

All I'm saying is that we've got an event larger than Worldcon in the same city that worldcon is in, which manages to control it's costs and charge less money. I think worldcon should try to do the same thing, but I'm not able to help to change it beyond suggesting things that are apparently infeasable.

(And as an aside to your comment about dealers, there's two dealers I know of who didn't join the Denvention dealers room because it was too expensive - buying a table + buying memberships for each person to man the booth was too much. So, that's a problem there too.)

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

All I'm saying is that we've got an event larger than Worldcon in the same city that worldcon is in, which manages to control it's costs and charge less money.

That's right. Let's see:

It's only 60% as long. (Three days instead of five.) Scale it the other way and assume no reverse economies of scale (they do exist!) and the $50 membership becomes $85 right away.

It's in the same place every year. This means you can make multi-year deals that almost certainly reduce the per-year cost substantially. I mean really substantially, like by more than 50%. Worldcons have vast fixed costs that can't be amortized over time.

It's run by the same organization every year. This means they can re-use material and knowledge instead of having to start from scratch every year. Also, it gives the possibility of building up reserve funds that can be used to insulate the event from any particular year having problems. Worldcons being one-shots have to start over from zero every year and must build that year's reserve into that year's budget, with no room for error, which means they almost certainly have to overcharge from year to year. The fact that 19 out of 20 Worldcons have had surplus funds (some of which they share with their successors) is a sign of this.

And Worldcons do not have an overarching parent organization with control and reserve funds. Oh, sure, there's the World Science Fiction Society, but WSFS is an unincorporated literary society whose membership consists of the members of the current Worldcon. It has no home office, no headquarters, and no funds of its own, aside from the tiny amount that the WSFS Mark Protection Committee manages (it's about $7,000 right now, as I recall, which is chicken feed against $1 million turnover) for protection of the society's service marks and the worldcon.org and TheHugoAwards.org web sites.

The underlying problem is that Worldcon is superficially the same thing as your local or regional SF convention, but it has some really significant structural differences that are not apparent to the average attendee. These structural differences introduce a really large inefficiency compared to the local ongoing convention. The only way you could "solve" all of the inefficiencies would be to change the event out of all recognition.

Nonetheless, I and otherw involved in running Worldcons do agree the that membership costs are higher than they should be. Part of this stems from the fact that few people actually know how to do proper finanical planning (budgeting) and tend to just keep raising rates out of fear of running out of money. I'd be much happier with a Worldcon of around 7000 people paying around $160 each than 3500 paying about $320 each, but we seem to be spiraling toward the latter and away from the former.

In 1984, I attended my first Worldcon, with an at-the-door cost of $75, which would be around $160 today. But I get the feeling that the younger crowd would be just as put off by $160 at-the-door as they would be by $220 -- that is, both of them are beyond what they're willing to pay, so they're effectively infinite.

Worldcons are great fun, and I haven't missed one since 1988 (Nolacon Two that year being the last one I didn't attend), but they're not cheap. I'd rather they not get any more expensive relative to other comparable events, but we're never going to get the costs down to the same level as three-day ongoing conventions, I think.