The LAN Party Cost Debate

Your Money

So at a professional LAN party, and using the epic.LAN events as an example, what do you actually get for your money:

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• The Venue - While you may be able to run a LAN party at home for no cost, or pick up a village hall for a weekend for a few hundred ££, a large LAN venue such as an exhibition/conference centre or sports venue will cost £1000s if not £10,000s for 3-4 days. Don't forget too that the venue isn't just hired for the event operating hours it takes time to setup and packdown, sometimes meaning the venue has to be hired for days either side of the event.
• Gaming Network - many of you will work in ICT and will know the costs of implementing a network where you can control the environment, but imagine the cost of providing a portable network (bearing in mind lots of wear & tear moving the kit around regularly) where hundreds of client machines turn up with a range of operating systems, hardware and quite often not clean of viruses. The LAN organisers pick up the costs for server hardware and software licenses, desk switches, core switches and lots of Cat5 as well as all of the peripherals such as keyboards, monitors, KVM etc.
• Power - With hundreds of machines, it's not safe for people or equipment to just buy a load of 4 way strips and daisy chain them together. At this size event, you're dealing with 3-phase power often at 32 or 64A and distribution/cabling of that is very expensive and normally custom built to your venue. The epic.LAN power setup runs to a few thousand pounds just for the rooms we currently use!
• Chairs/Tables - If you're lucky you may be able to find a venue that already has enough, but as numbers grow that's unlikely, so there's another hire cost.
• Security - A typical SIA badged security guard runs at about £15-£20 per hour.
• Accomodation - Remember at a LAN party, unless you want to upgrade to a local hotel, you get accomodation included either as free camping or indoors.
• Insurance - As a person you are insured during the event for any injuries, we have to have public liability insurance, though it's not possible/affordable to insure everybody's equipment so that remains your responsibility.
• Staff Time - Depending on the organisation you either have employed or volunteer staff working potentially 24h a day for 3-4 days to give you a high level of service whether it is diagnosing your PC problems (think what a PC repair shop would charge), serving you at the shop, or running the network and games behind the scene.
• Software Systems - At a larger LAN you will find a large number of professionally developed software systems whether it's a simple intranet, through to full tournament management and gameserver deployment.
• Random Supplies - Things like gaffa tape, drawing pins, tools, spare plugs/fuses, spare cables all mount up financially very quickly!
• Vehicles - Vans or multiple vans need to be hired and fuelled to transport the sheer amount of kit too and from a venue.
• Internet Connectivity - Isn't cheap to provide something suitable for over 200 people for a weekend, and sadly not everybody can get these things sponsored.
• Ongoing costs - Something has to happen to all of the kit between events. Larger organisers such as Multiplay have office costs to lease and maintain, smaller events often use storage units which also have regular bills to pay for their rental and insurance of kit.