Along the end of September somebody posted on Facebook asking people why there seems to be a drop in the amount of contestants joining cosplay competitions as well as the general amount of attendees in the event. It seems to have attracted a bit of attention within its concerned circles and everyone seems to have their own opinion on the matter. So we decided to put out a survey to get a general idea of what people think on the matter of ‘convention fatigue.’

When we say ‘Convention Fatigue’ we are referring to an individual getting tired of visiting conventions for whatever reason that may be. Typical reasons being having a lot of conventions happening within a short span of each other or just generally featuring similar content with little to no variety.

Our contributor Jill created a survey that asks about cosplay conventions in particular, however there should be a reasonable overlap with other anime or geek interest conventions as the audience they attract are more or less within the same strike zone. We had generated the survey through the typical google forms and simply shared it on our own media platforms. Netting us about 120 responses between August 28 to 31, 2018. All of our questions were answered through a comment box instead of a drop-down option between numbers or a yes/no answer. We didn’t spot any obvious indications of anyone flooding similar responses or any sort of manipulation to skew the results.

Now with that stuff out of the way, let’s get to the questions and the responses.

We asked about budget, including cost for food and transportation. Among the respondents there were some interesting answers, one of them typed ‘unli’ for this question, which we arbitrarily decided to write as ‘10,000.’ There was also one who mentioned that they’d go so far as 70,000.00 PHP if they’re going to fly to another country for it. There were also some who mentioned a range between two figures, where we just took the average and assumed that to be the case. It is also noted that many respondents also said they’d be willing to shell out more than usual if they found the featured convention or its content to be worth that extra amount of cash.

Some may wonder why we decided to go with ‘other responses’ rather than ‘maybe.’ This would be because some of those responses were roundabout ways of saying, yes, no, maybe and perhaps not even really answer the question at all. As these responses are vague, we placed them in a generic, third category.

For these results, we tallied how frequently of the respondents that said ‘yes’ to the previous question would mention particular topics. While these do appear to be the top 3, the first two are mentioned much more often by a large margin compared to the third item in this list, ‘ticket price.’ In fact other reasons such as: difficulties with the organizers, long lines, and inconvenient venue don’t trail far behind the number of mentions of ticket price.

The responses here were treated the same way as the last pie chart.

On this last question, the most common idea is to simply feature new content but there appears to be a lot of variety in what they believe would be ‘new content.’ From the actual theme of the convention, its featured guests, booths, freebies, activities, even the hosts themselves. The next two items, new venues and better floor plans, are neck-and-neck on the race which isn’t much of a surprise considering how related they are.

What do you think? Why don’t you share your thoughts and experiences to us? Would you like us to hold another survey?

Do comment below!