In the UK we call them, rather quaintly, ‘ticket touts’; in Mojang’s book they’re “scalpers” – gruesome trophy hunters intent on selling the promise of MineCon 2013 at vastly inflated prices. As the painfully limited supply of tickets to the Orlando event dries up, the developers are advising fans against buying second-hand.
“Tickets are completely sold out, and we don’t recommend buying them second hand from scalpers,” wrote Mojang’s Vu Bui, “because they are terribly expensive and there’s no way to guarantee that you will be getting genuine tickets. We also won’t be selling tickets at the door, because tens of thousands of people could show up, and our venue is planned for the 7500 tickets we sold.”
The $150 MineCon tickets were sold in three batches of 2,500 over the course of this week. The first were reserved within three seconds and didn’t last a minute. The third were gone within a similarly stupid timeframe on Saturday.
“We choose to keep MINECON limited to a relatively small group of people so that we can interact with them and give them the best experience possible,” explained Vui. “We split the ticket sales into 3 batches of 2500 to give people the most chance of being able to buy them when they are available, whether they have jobs, school or other things that could get in the way of any one specific time or day.
“While it would make us all happy to have everyone who wants to come be able to get tickets, it’s just not feasible with the size of community we have, so we had to choose what felt like it would be the best number for the event we want to give you.”
As usual, the Disneyland event with be streamed live, and the main panels with be uploaded to Youtube in their entirety afterwards. But I do get the impression that Mojang could host 12 MineCons a year and sell out every time, don’t you?