The above is a sentence everyone will have heard a hundred times from a variety of people. The expense of LARP events is always something that has been one of contention, with larpers seeming to almost always be hunting for a cheaper event. Adamant that their hobby remain low budget and affordable for all, but still expecting a great site, good props, good crew kit, makeup, and in some cases pyrotechnics not far removed from big budget film quality.
But what are the real economics of a LARP event? How do organisers go about gathering the ticket money and then spending it? It wouldn’t be right for me to assume I know how every event organiser runs their finances, but I can speak about my own experiences of running an event. For the examples in this post, I’ll assume the event is catering for 30-50 players.
So lets start at the beginning with site hire. Most sites in the UK that I have approached vary between £500 to £1750 for a three day hire. Each site is different in terms of what additional costs are required on top so you really have to read the small print and know exactly what you need before you start looking. For example chemical toilets, again for a 30-50 person event you would want at least 6-8 toilets for a Friday to Sunday event. Average costs per toilet vary from £45 to £70 different firms include delivery and some have that as an extra charge of £30 regardless of the amount you hire.
So at a bare minimum at this point you have either spent £665 for a fairly average site plus additional toilets if you find somewhere that will deliver with the cheaper bracket of toilets or £740 for the same site with a more expensive toilet hire firm. Or you have hired the mega site and have spent £1750.
Now you have a game, you have a site to run it on – which you have either paid a deposit for or the full amount up front. You’re selling tickets for what is the UK average of between £65-£85 for an event this size. Selling 30 tickets would give you about £1950 to play with, or £3250 if you manage to sell 50 – that’s at the lower end of the price bracket of course. Around £700 of that is already spoken for with the site hire.
The next big expense comes insurance and this will vary hugely according to what your event is doing, and also if your site has insurance that hirers can use. If it’s the latter then you’ve hit jackpot because it’s an expense you don’t need to worry about. But if the site doesn’t come with insurance then your next step is to be ready for lots of phone calls with insurance companies who will often have no idea what it is they are insuring. You’re going to have to come up with a way to explain exactly what LARP is. There are some LARP insurance people out there, however in my experience none of them as of yet have been able to help if you utter the dreaded term….. airsoft. It’s almost a taboo word in the UK LARP scene. Insurance for a LARP that uses airsoft on average varies between £800 and £1150 which is a huge amount of money. So the key is to try and find a site that has a policy that allows you to use theirs rather than have to arrange your own. Of course this limits the amount of sites that an airsoft LARP will be able to use, but hopefully that will start to change in the future as it becomes more common.
Further down the list of things to spend event money on is crew kit and weapons. This is less of an issue if you run say a historical fantasy event. Most larpers own kit suitable for this unless you do something truly different like Mythlore. Mythlore however is unusual in that it charges over £100 a ticket and if you have seen any of the photos from those events its very easy to see why. The standards of kit are incredible.
But lets assume you have decided to do an event that is not typical fantasy, maybe its a sci-fi event, a very accurately historically themed event, or a post-apocalyptic event – none of which can use genetic fantasy style costuming or weapons. You need crew weapons so you contact several weapon makers and get a variety of quotes. For around 30 weapons (individual designs rather than a batch) you will be looking at anything between £600 to £1200 depending on who you speak to, the size of weapon ordered, how much they like you and if you can arrange a discount of some kind. At this point your budget is starting to look not anywhere near enough, you haven’t even looked at crew costume, FX, pyro or any other consumable that you require for your event.
All of this you hopefully researched before selling tickets, but as with all things, a quote can change. When you initial agreed to hire the site perhaps it included toilets, but due to some damage to site it no longer does and you now need to hire more chemical toilets to cover this. The insurance quote might now be higher than originally stated. The site you originally wanted to use has had an enormous issue and can’t be used but your backup site is more expensive. All these sort of issues as well as the fact that people seem adamant to not spend money to attend but still expect it to be amazing means more and more events run with the organiser ending up out of pocket. Very few run and break even and some large scale events do turn a profit, but most smaller events (and specifically events that break out of the traditional fantasy mould) will end up costing the event organiser money.
I have spoken to several event organisers whose events I believe are truly special and every single one of them has ended up putting their own money into the event to ensure it can run. Now it is easy to argue that this is due to bad finances, an inability to budget properly. But the truth is not as simple as that, running an event has a host of hidden costs and with the LARP community largely unwilling to spend much money on attending events there will always be people who decide to run at a loss to put on something special. Last of all, these hard working event organisers and refs are not paid, that event price that budget is all done with zero payment for the plot writers, the refs, the crew, and the organiser themselves. Thousands of hours can be spent creating the event before a player even sets foot in the game world.
So next time you decide to suggest that an event is too expensive perhaps consider that maybe we are used to events being too cheap, rather than that particular event being too expensive.
10 Comments
I agree Caz, most people have just gotten too used to events being too low a price- and it’s having a detrimental impact on the hobby as a result.
I may be the odd one out here, but I doubt it, in that as I can afford to do so I am actually willing to pay extra for a ticket in order to help the organisers out. I don’t just mean that can add a fiver to the price and I’ll still pay it, I mean that in addition to having a box for those on low income to tick to get a discount, go right ahead and add a box to tick that says I’m willing to pay extra to get a more awesome event!
There are plenty of hobbies out there, and all in all LARP is actually not as expensive as an awful lot of them. I have friends at work who spend as much on their football shirts and the like as I do on costume, and then a couple of hours for a game to watch can be knocking on the cost of my whole weekend LARPing.
Quite frankly, it’s actually a comparatively cheap hobby!
I think the price issue is somewhat escalated by the sorts of people who frequent LARP games. In my experience LARPers seem to fall into two categories: Old Larpers & Young Larpers.
Old Larpers have been around for a while and as a result have collected bits or kit from their years long career and enjoy commenting about how they have been Larping longer than many of their peers have been alive. They also always have the best drinks, because they know where to go to get it. More importantly Older Larpers tend to have more disposable cash, they have established careers that support their hobby, or just have access to a car so can avoid the dreaded expense of public transport or the hassle of car sharing. All in all this category tends to be able to afford their events with minimal faff or worry.
Younger Larpers, or those inbetween jobs, tend to have a lot less kit and/or dispossable income. They might be students, or have the expense of children. They might not be all that young at all. However, the ultimate issue is they have to really dedicate a higher proportion of their income to being able to attend Larp.
So the issue with low prices seems to come about from trying to be inclusive as possible. Providing an event where the ticket price is low enough to allow for a broader spectrum of attendees. If ticket prices rise, you run the danger of eliminating a proportion of your customer base.
It’s always a matter of balance between the total cost rather than the ticket cost, the time, and the rest of Real Life. For me a weekend at Empire means travel, four or five days of food, ticket price, plus contributions to the game we play in terms of several days of baking, time for brewing, and the costs involved with that, plus the extra kit needed both on the field (barrels, bottles, chilly bin etc.), their making and care, AND the extra kit and storage needed at home to cover these things. If I pay £60 for my ticket, an extra tenner for an extra night on the field for set-up, I can more than double that in contributions and travel.
Generally speaking, between my pension (the glorious sum of £230 a month!) and what I earn dressing LARPERs, brides, etc. I can afford several events a year, without too big an impact on household income, but it’s a close call. It could be more of a problem now Himself (who doesn’t LARP) is retired. I’m extraordinarily lucky that storage for kit is less of an issue for me than most because I have a very long garden and lots of shed space!
I don’t think it matters what age you are so much as which point in your earning and holiday potential you have reached. Bering part time self employed and semi-retired, I have time to use, but health and other issues cause restrictions elsewhere.
[…] going to start by asking you take a look another blog. Specifically the rather wonderful larp.guide – and a recent post about the cost of events. This article explains the financial pressures of running a game. It talks about where the money […]
[…] usually judge what you’re going to get at a LRP event by what is being charged for a ticket. Prices are rising; a basic event with food and shelter is now regularly in the £80-100 range. This is good because […]
Honestly, I don’t mind a higher cost. After, a lot of people do a lot of work.
Though, as a currently unemployed person, I think there could be done an increase in events with a staged payment plan to help younger people attend larger events, ofc with necessary arrangements to ensure payment.
This could aid in bringing the younger generation of larpers into the fold, and not making these huge things a event solely for older people, thus loosing a lot of potential to bring the hobby forward.
After all, we are currently having a increased income divide in most countries and LARP has always been a great way to build bridges between social spheres.
It has been for me.
I think, personally, a better approach would be for an individual to open a savings account and put a regular deposit into that account. Then they have ‘paid’ for their events in instalments rather than having to ask the event organiser to take that hit (often around 50% of your ticket price is paying for things that have to be paid up front – so asking an organiser to fund your payment plan out of their own pocket seems a little unkind).
As for young people – they are the group who are most likely to have the most amount of free cash. A young person often lives with their parents or with friends, has no large financial commitments, and can work more if they want to have more money. It’s when people get older and get mortgages, car payment plans, families, etc, that they have much less free cash to spent on hobbies.
For some, the expense isn’t just the price of the event. It also includes the cost of travel, food, and lodging. It also includes the cost of having to take a week off from work, which means losing a weeks worth of pay.
When I say that I can’t afford to go, I don’t just mean that I can’t afford the entrance fee. I mean that I can’t afford to take time off from work. I can afford to pay, I can afford the gas to get there. I might be able to afford staying the night at a hotel on the way. I can find the money to afford food for the week. But once all that is over, I have spent all my savings and am now going to be a week short on my check.
This makes it hard to be able to pay rent, pay my car loan payment, my insurance, my phone bill, buy any groceries, and any other expenses I have. And I don’t even have kids. How much harder is it on parents, who have to also buy clothes, school supplies, and everything else?
I don’t think that’s a problem though personally. Hobbies cost money – and some hobbies cost more than others. There are low cost LARP’s available to those who don’t have as much money. There are single day, or two day LARP’s available for those who don’t want to take a week off work (in fact I’ve never been to a LARP that required someone to take a week off work!).
But high production value LARP’s are (and should be) expensive. And not everyone can afford that. And that’s ok too.
This is less about the actual hobby of LARPing than it is about going to LARP events.
Only the very large fest events seem to make any money. I remember us once being very pleased with ourselves when we could afford a meal for the refs on the way home, that was classed as a great financial success! haha
Even large fests can’t return any money without using massive amounts of volunteer cash. It’s possible to run an event that does produce some money, but your audience will be the people that are willing to pay that much and you’ll have to cater to them, and most people don’t want to do that. They want to run the games they want to run, and it’s not worth the compromise for the tiny amount of cash you’d get back.
[…] 2. That Event Is Too Expensive […]
[…] We run fairly expensive games. We get a lot of people who tell us we charge too much for our games but to be quite blunt we couldn’t run our games if we charged less. We could run games, however they would lack some of the things that make our games the games we want to run. We don’t make money running events. We spend money running events. However much our players run we’ve invested far more in unpaid time, and often we’ve paid more money to make things work. (Ed. – see a previous post on how much games cost to run.) […]