Our gaming zone was always busy from 8 AM until late into the night at Indy PopCon 2015.
I am just finishing up 18 straight days of being on the road. Some of the nights I was able to make it home to sleep in my bed and see the family, but many of them were in hotel rooms. My wife and I have dubbed this year #Hustle2015 to make sure we work and play as hard as we can all year long and leave nothing on the table. Looking back over the past 2+ weeks and I think I might be going overboard on that motto.
It has been a little over a month since Indy PopCon 2015 and it feels like it was years ago. So much of the event is still fresh in my mind however so I wanted to get some of the details recorded here for my own future reference and the benefit of our partners and sponsors.
Here is how our rooms usually look right before we load everything into them and fill them with players shortly after.
Indy PopCon started in 2014 and it was our very first convention. It was underwhelming for both the convention owners and for eBash with small attendance numbers but we learned a lot. I am good friends with the Indy PopCon team now and we can be blunt about that first year because this year things got much better. Maybe a little too much better?
In 2015 Indy PopCon estimates they had over 23,000 attendees. This was driven by their genius booking of some big YouTube players such as Markiplier (https://www.youtube.com/user/markiplierGAME) and some of his friends. It created some new problems such as how to let thousands of fans meet their YouTube heroes when there was only time for half that many to see them, but overall the convention went great for eBash in our gaming zone.
We had 3 rooms just outside the exhibit hall opened up together for about a 5500 square foot giant room with our own entrances to control traffic and stay open late. We had 1743 players play games in our space and overall nearly 7500 came through our room to participate or watch the events. Players could choose to play for an hour in the open play zone and play anything they wanted or we ran structured events nearly every hour of the day for the following games:
– League of Legends (PC)
– Hearthstone (PC)
– Heroes of the Storm (PC)
– Super Smash Brothers 4 (Wii U)
– MarioKart 8 (Wii U)
– Racing Simulators
– Minecraft (PC)
– Smite (PC)
– Heroes of Newerth (PC)
Overall set-up in the zone:
– 100 gaming PCs from Alienware
– 4 Wii U stations (16 players)
– 4 Racing Simulators
Here is a link to our photo album from Indy PopCon 2015 on our Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.493057540870800.1073741838.164617063714851&type=3
The changes for eBash from 2014-2015 with our convention set-up is pretty amazing. It also feels great to try and put together what we think players will enjoy and then seeing the room full during the convention with happy players. While we still work on how these events work with our LAN Centers and our new competition software (www.ggCircuit.com) the one thing that I do know is that we seem to be in the right place at exactly the right time and that is VERY exciting.
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