Now that this year’s Tokyo Game Show is behind us, the official attendance figures have been released and reveal that it was a busy year.
However, the interesting part is that the official attendance numbers (shown below) were actually only increased on the business days, with the public days having around a 20% drop in attendance. Whereas the business days saw a big bump in attendance, again around 20%.
This is why in my write-up of his year’s show, I commented on the palpable increase of people as I attended the Thursday, which saw roughly 10,000 more people compared to last year.
Over the four days of the show, the total attendance was 263,101 people, which was slightly less than last year’s, which came in at 274,739 attendees.
My guess as to why the public numbers fell is that there were fewer console game announcements this year, and still large mobile gaming booths, which no one really wants to visit.
However, the business days are definitely getting more crowded, and to accommodate this, the Tokyo Game Show will add an extra day next year. With the event spanning from Thursday, September 17, until Monday, September 21, the latter being a Japanese national holiday.
This will be the first time in the history of the Tokyo Game Show that the event will be held across 5 days.
As for the impact of all the layoffs we’ve seen over the past few years, most big games have a 7-8 year development cycle. So the new games on show this year likely started their lives around 2017-2018.
In short, we won’t be seeing the impact of game development layoffs for a good few years to come, so this apparent “boom” is not occurring in real time, which is worth taking note of.
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