The LAN Party Cost Debate

Price Comparison

Now let's take a look at the LAN party pricing, with epic.LAN as an initial example:

• Full epic.SIX Ticket Price - £55 (though some people will pay less due to the early discounts and loyalty points, so we will use £50 as our average pricing)
• epic.LAN spans four days (Thurs-Sun) but runs for around 72 hours so technically per day that's just £16.67 per day or 69p per hour for our LAN event.

Even when you compare a Multiplay (the UK's largest LAN party), their full event ticket is £90, but reduced down to £63 with an early bird offer giving an average of £76.50 or £25.50 per day/£1.06 per hour.

Other Leisure Activities

So bearing in mind those other activities, let's compare the pricing of a LAN party per day/hour to a few others, and I'm using examples in the Midlands area as that is where our LAN is hosted

• A pint of lager - £2.50 (duration <1hr)
• A 'heavy' night out - £70-£100 (duration approx 6 hours)
• A normal, non 3d, film - £7 (duration <3 hours)
• Swimming Session - £3 (duration approx 1 hour)
• Ten Pin Bowling, 1 game - £6 (duration 30mins)
• Badminton Court - £8 (duration 1 hour)
• Horse Racing, general admission, - £8 (duration around 3 hours)
• Camping - £10-£20 (duration 1 day)
• Karting - £15 (duration 1-2 hours)
• Football match - £30-50 (duration <2 hours)
• Alton Towers - £30.40 (duration 1 day)
• V-Festival + Camping - £165 (duration 2 days)
• Formula 1 Grand Prix, General Admission + Camping -£179 (duration 3 days)

Added the camping activities in because of course camping is usually free at a LAN party, but you pay extra at festivals and sports events. Haven't included extra food & drink for any of these as they are quite variable costs.