PAX Attendance Tops 60K, Expansion Planned For Next Year
Talking to BigDownload, Penny Arcade's Director of Business Development Robert Khoo confirmed that this year's Penny Arcade attendance topped out at 60,750, a number about 2,000 higher than last year. He also explained that this year's early sell-out wasn't necessarily due to much higher demand, but was put in place by the Washington State Convention and Trade Center, out of fears that the folks behind the webcomic wouldn't be able to handle the large crowds and that it might become a safety issue. After a day of successful herd management on Friday, they convinced the venue to let them offer a limited number of single day passes for the show on Saturday and Sunday.
Khoo also hinted that expansion plans are in the works for next year, although he didn't give specifics. Let's hope those expansion plans include a few extra Purell stations. This year saw an additional floor added to the convention, mostly for panels and gaming rooms, but the building is only so tall. Just know that next year, you might be standing in even more ridiculously long lines for the chance to get some ugly t-shirts.
Exclusive: PAX 2009 brings in 60,750 attendees [BigDownload]
Dawdle
Posted to Video Games on 12 September 2009
· Comments (3)
Other stuff like this: convention, crowds, pax 2009, penny arcade
I can agree with you on that Dawdle. This being my 5th year I'd have to say it's great to see PAX has grown so huge. The down fall is the larger crowds creating longer line ups to play the games.
It feels great to be swimming in gamer geek but it sucks when they smell like ass because they haven't showered the whole weekend.The most enjoyable time is getting to hang with the gaygamer.net crew.
It would be nice to have it on the East coast :) (Orlando, maybe?)
Weence: Hanging with you guys is awesome. There's not enough weekend. If you're going to PAX to get to play all the prerelease games the big crowds do suck, but I didn't bother and just focused on hanging out with all the cool people.
hrnball: PAX East is on Boston. Look in the upper right corner of PAXsite.com