Cancelling an event

This is a tough one.

I have a mixture of feelings about this - sadness being the primary one, but also frustration and a smattering of relief somewhere in there.

If you don’t already know, I recently decided to cancel an event - Den of Wolves in Columbus, OH, originally scheduled for April 27th. The way my events usually go is that I put the tickets on sale approximately 10 weeks before the event. In this case, 5 weeks into that period we had only sold 4 tickets. It is true that some people wait until a couple of weeks out from the day before buying their tickets but my experience and history tell me that I’m usually a lot further along in sales by the 5 week mark. If we had been somewhere in the teens, it may have been salvageable. Worst case scenario is that we’d play a 14-player Megagame (which is totally doable, if a little underwhelming).

I looked at my room contract and realized that if I cancelled the event > 30 days out, I could get back 50% of my payment. That gave me ~5 days to make the decision. I did a last push on the advertising and told my control team the situation. If we didn’t see a big boost of sales really soon, I would cancel the event. In the business world, the room rental is what’s known as a sunk cost - that’s something you’ve already paid for that you can’t base any future judgements on. You simply make the best decisions going forwards. That 50% was gone, if I cancelled prior to 30 days out, I’d at least get 50% back.

And that’s what I did.

So what went wrong?

This section is purely speculation because I’m not sure I really know what went wrong but I’m sure it’s a combination of things:

We are running/have ran (depending on when you read this) Den of Wolves in Ypsilanti, MI about 3 weeks before. Some of my ticket sales come from players outside of the city we’re hosting in and I have found those are the kind of players who know what a megagame is and are willing to drive to get to one. That we were running the same game just a few weeks before probably hurt my sales. Not only that, whilst Den of Wolves is a perfect first game for a new city, it’s also a game that experienced megagamers have played before and are unlikely to make the drive to play.

I’m not sure I had the connections to the audience in Columbus. In Louisville (and Ypsilanti to some extent), I have a long list of Facebook groups, Discord channels, Reddit threads and local game stores in which to advertise. I also have more contacts here in Louisville who can spread the word by mouth. I just didn’t have those two things in Columbus. I had some, but it was probably not enough. I had also been booted from some of the OH channels for advertising. To be fair, they do explicitly say they’ll do that when you first join, but it’s only happened so far in the OH groups. Probably just unlucky, but it does reduce my footprint in the community.

My price was possibly too high. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again - whilst I believe Megagames are worth $50-$60 for a ticket, they’re not worth that to someone that doesn’t know what a megagame is - for those folks, the ticket price is a gamble and so you have to predict what they’re willing to lose. I had set the ticket price for this game at $40 because my Ypsilanti game was set that high (fairly affluent area) and I decided to match it. I was also hoping that name recognition would be enough to get people to show up and pay the $40. As a matter of reference, when we ran our first game in Louisville in 2022, my ticket price was $25 because it was a brand new audience and I’d rather fill the event than break even.

Columbus is the home to Origins and so they may be something to be said about the convention being the place where people want to do “serious” gaming, or big gaming events. Not only that, some of the Megagame Coalition crew put on Den of Wolves occasionally there and I don’t think they charge. I knew those things going in but I was hoping to capture a new audience of non-megagamers - people who don’t play at Origins and don’t know what a megagame is.

And what do we do differently next time?

This is a tough one to answer because I’m not sure. I’d certainly address some of the things mentioned in the above section (reduced ticket price, move further away from another game) but perhaps it was just the wrong place wrong time. I’m starting to think that I’d need a much larger email distribution list for my local games before I market games in other cities. As I write this, Ypsilanti is currently at 26/44 tickets sold so whilst that’s doable, it’s certainly not an ideal number of players either.

I feel like I also need a larger team “on the ground” to help with spreading the word face-to-face. Megagames are incredibly hard to describe and hype up via a simple paragraph on a post. Nothing beats face-to-face when it comes to describing what a megagame looks and feels like. Even though I didn’t get anything for doing River City Con, we were able to set up the day before (so people could see the footprint) and walk around the convention talking to people. That helped tremendously to engaging with a new audience.

What happens when you’ve bought a ticket for an event that’s cancelled?

Not to worry, we’re very flexible. I am reaching out to each ticket purchaser seperately to talk through their options. I will offer to transfer their tickets to another event or I’ll give them a complete refund. They shouldn’t be punished for something out of their control. This isn’t FYRE FEST for goodness sake.

So what’s next for the Dukes?

Whilst I’m saddened, I’m certainly not disheartened. I’ve only had It belongs in a museum tickets on for sale for about 5 days and I’m already at 10 tickets sold with minimal advertising. I’d be very surprised if we didn’t sell this event out. Then we’ve got 3 games at Gen Con (which will almost definitely sell out) and It came from the Skies!!! in the fall. So we still have great events upcoming that I’m extremely confident will be successful.