>>9943300I think it was like 1/3rd fewer people, but man, when i remember at how the panels were, it's literally 5x fewer people who showed up. Rooms normally stay full at all times, but there were always lines of people waiting to come in too. This year almost nothing ever filled up and most times it was half full, if that. Despite the hundreds of people, some SDCC staff vets were describing the panels as graveyards.
For the exhibitor hall it was definitely less crowded too. Still, most of the normal booths definitely looked like they were making money. I talked to a few of them and they said that sales were steady, so they probably went away richer than they showed up.
It's booths like Jazwares, Underverse, Mattel, etc etc who sell exclusives where i just did not see much movement. Yeah, there's the raffle that happened before the convention so you could just show up whenever to buy your shit without lines, but there was a LOT of merch left over. I saw booth workers crawling over their exclusives to find something.
Exclusives from Underverse/3a normally sell out either on Thursday or Friday. By Sunday this year, they had a mountain of boxes and tshirts still. i was thinking about buying another few figures because i want to see more made and seeing that much shit left over doesn't bode well for future merch.
Some booths, like Beast Kingdom, were pricing some of their figures at 40% off on Saturday, because they just werent selling. Not sure if they were exclusives or not.
If this had been previous years, i'd be cheering at all the cheap prices, but there seriously was almost nothing i wanted from exclusives this year. I bought the Haloman Jazwares exclusive because they had tons left over and i might as well own a 1:12 scale Haloguy.
