Getting a badge for PAX is impossible, and here’s why
Why your solutions to PAX ticket sales won’t work
Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) is a massive convention celebrating gaming and game design, with tens of thousands of attendees at each of their events (Prime in Seattle, South in Texas, East in Boston). The one piece of advise any PAX goer will give you is this: Be ready to get your badges at a moment’s notice. The demand for PAX greatly outweighs the supply, leading to insane sellout times. Last year, PAX East weekend badges sold out in 16 minutes, with Saturday badges right behind them at 1 hour. Fans are frustrated with the system that leaves so many potential goers empty handed year after year. What can Penny Arcade do to fix this?
What PAX is looking for is some way to clear the market- that is, they want to change their supply, demand, or price to create a balance between the number of badge-wanters and the number of badges. In an interview, Robert Khoo from Penny Arcade talks about why it is so hard to get a PAX badge. He addresses three points:
- Increasing Price: They estimate that badge prices would have to increase 5-10x to clear the market. This would put the cost around $750-1500.
- Decreasing Demand: They could just make PAX a lower quality convention that fewer people want to go to.
- Increasing Supply: The limiting factor for the size of PAX is the size of the venue. To increase supply, PAX would have to find a larger venue.
Penny Arcade does not want to increase the price or lower the quality of the convention, and struggles to find a larger venue; as a result, PAX gets more and more selective as demand continues to increase.
This year, things were a little different. Just yesterday, PAX East 2017 registration was opened. They removed the weekend badges and slightly increased the price of day badges. Saturday badges sold out in 1.5 hours, and the clock is still ticking for Friday and Sunday 24 hours later. This is clearly an improvement in time from previous years! Let’s assume that every weekend badge was converted into separate Fri-Sat-Sun badges. This increase in supply, along with a price increase (a weekend badge was 60% of the cost of buying all three days separately), may be responsible for the improved sellout time.
Will PAX ever reach an equilibrium?