How much does it cost to go to PAX South?

Hi there! Here's a breakdown of what we spent to bring our game, Ultimate Chicken Horse, to PAX South, and it's meant to help other game developers to budget themselves when going to trade shows. We'll also talk about what we think we got from the show, and what we could have done better. Worth it? Totally... read on.

So first off, how much does it cost to go to one of these shows? We were two people coming from Montreal, Canada, and here were our costs.

The flights we got had one layover of about an hour on the way there, and the same on the way back. In reality Richard missed his first flight because of customs issues and took 19h to get there, and the flight home was delayed so we missed our connecting flight and stayed overnight in Dallas..... but the idea was one layover. 

We stayed at the Red Roof Plus in downtown San Antonio, about a ten minute walk from the convention center. It had everything we needed, and it was really well located.Transport refers to taxis and Ubers going to the hotel from the airport and back, and we had underestimated because we thought there would be a shuttle downtown from the airport. Travel insurance was super cheap, we got from Manulife here in Canada. The only other show cost we had was buying batteries for our controllers which ran out of batteries super quickly. 

What did we get out of going to PAX? Well if you saw our Pictures from PAX South post, you would see that our booth was super busy, which was great for testing and to see how much people were enjoying the game. We got some great press coverage as well at the booth, like this PC Gamer video, and we had some mega YouTubers and Twitch streamers come by and play the game.

We also had a presence on the Twitch stage, which had panels and games on rotation throughout the show. The event was being livestreamed on the Twitch channel, which is pretty massive, but we also had a lot of people come by the booth after saying they saw the gameplay live from the Twitch stage. The stage was also a great place to hang around and try to meet streamers... Rich met some big Twitch personalities just hanging out in the area. 

The way we did PAX was pretty efficient, in our opinion. Richard wandered a bunch doing the business development stuff he does, and Alex manned the booth most of the time. You'd be surprised how easy it is for one person to man a booth constantly full of 20 people, depending on how easy the game is to understand.

Anyway all in all, great show and great experience. You can check out the game we were showing, Ultimate Chicken Horse, here.

TL;DR
 PAX isn't cheap, look at the cost table!
Got great feedback on the game at the bustling booth
Got good press because of show presence
Met some big YouTubers and streamers who will help the game sell when it's out