Please come in and sit down. We need to talk about PAX Prime.
The show is completely sold out. 3 day passes were gone in a day. The rest of the passes were gone shortly after. It was by far the fastest PAX has ever sold out. The result is that there are many of you who want to go but can’t because you didn’t grab one in time. I’m getting some mail from you guys and you’re understandably frustrated. I’m also getting lots of suggestions for how we could fix this. Let me try and respond to the big ones:
“Sell more tickets!”
This is a nice idea but we have hit a hard limit here in Seattle. We are up against the fire code at the Washington State Convention Center. So selling more tickets to PAX Prime is simply not an option.
“Sell them in waves.”
I hear this one a lot and there are a couple reasons this won’t help. First off, each wave would sell out in a matter of minutes rather than hours. I’m not sure that is an improvement. Also, we can still only sell a certain number of tickets. The fact is that more people want to go to PAX than we can safely fit in the venue. Even if we sell them in waves there will be thousands of people who can’t get a ticket and are upset.
“Don’t let scalpers buy them!”
For the most part they aren’t. The average number of passes purchased was 1.7. Also hotels in downtown Seattle are also almost all sold out. Unless scalpers are also buying up rooms and the Marriott, this just isn’t a huge factor.
“Why not let us buy tickets for the next PAX at the current PAX?”
Because then we’d have a massive line of people trying to buy tickets for the next show. You’d waste your entire PAX trying to get tickets for the next PAX. Also it would screw people who aren’t there.
The bottom line is that we have something like 200k people who want to attend a show that only holds about 60k. No matter what we do there will be 140 thousand upset people. So what is the answer?
Well we’re working on that. Could we make a third PAX? Possibly. Have we talked about moving the show? Yes. Have we talked about extending it out into monday? Absolutely. Does any of that help you this year? Sadly no and I'm really sorry. Trust me when I tell you that our goal is to make it so that everyone who wants to go to a PAX can go to a PAX.
-Gabe out
