There was a larp conference in the UK this weekend (Camelot), and I’m waiting for slides and talks to show up. But the first one I’ve seen has been from Rachel Thomas of Crooked House (“God Rest Ye Merry” and “All For One”, which some of you may have heard of) on “The Economics of LARP: or The Failure of Market Forces (Part 1)”:
The TL;DR: they ran expensive events which made a loss (a big loss for GRYM, statistically breaking even on All For One). Because making money at larp is hard etc. But there’s also a suggestion in there that you can do this as a loss leader to “make your name” - but for what? There’ll be more in this series, including stuff on how much events would cost if the staff were paid (we can guess: an obscene amount), so its largely a “watch this space”.
(And meanwhile, I’m struggling to think of the last larp event I ran which made a loss. But one-night theatreforms are on a completely different scale, and we know the equation: this many people in this venue = profit. And in the wider Wellington community, we know the equation for a weekend at Brookfields as well. But those are different scale events from those discussed in the article, and I think what’s clear is that they don’t know the equation for the stuff they’re doing, because each event is bespoke, and meanwhile they’re testing the market on price…)