alt Hacker NewsI love the idea and am working on something similar around getting more IRL events out in the world with https://onthe.town
I do wonder if the problem is not so much having a place to find LAN events but actually just having enough people put on LAN events in the first place. It feels like a thing of the past with how much less people interact in person these days. It's a shame because LANs are awesome!
Have you thought about ways to make it easier for people to host LAN events? Or does this solve that as well? I guess a solution would require matching random people together. Happy to discuss more - nick at onthe.town
Hello! I'll shoot you an email. Maybe we can mob on this problemscape together.
> I do wonder if the problem is not so much having a place to find LAN events but actually just having enough people put on LAN events in the first place.
Sort of! I did a lot of research on this before I built lan.events. There are more gamers than ever, but LANs dropped off during COVID lockdowns despite surveys showing an increasing interest in in-person events. More or less, it's actually a venue problem. Running events has incredibly thin and risky margins for something that by its very nature needs to be planned out months in advance. Everything around the events are becoming prohibitively expensive: venues, vendors, equipment rentals, etc are all eating away at the ceiling gamers will pay and the floor that organizations can charge from.
LAN.events helps tackle this by decreasing the cost per ticket and shifting that cost to the customer rather than the event manager. We don't introduce minimum event costs or percentage based pricing which lets event managers keep or give back more profits. There is more I can do in this space, but that's the biggest way I can contribute right now.