MassiveLAN Winter 2026 Recap

Hello MassiveLANners,

First off, a huge thank you to everyone that attended and contributed and helped to make this our biggest event ever! We’ve reviewed your feedback, compared our own notes, and have started setting some goals for our summer event that we’d like to share with you. 

Ticket Sales: 315! This was our biggest event by ticket sales ever. After an explosive opening week we thought sales might plateau, normalizing to more typical sales numbers but instead our sales largely continued from there following the normal trend right up to last minute tickets. This was an awesome surprise for sure, but those early sales paid off in our raffle prize allocation, notably getting us our first graphics card in the prize pool in nearly a decade! 

*Insert soundboard: (AJ) “If we get to 500 people you can shave my head.”*

Fundraising: This event was huge for us! We’re currently looking at $4,478 raised for Camp Good Days and we cannot express enough how much this means to us and how much we appreciate your contributions. In the past, we always paid our charity beneficiary based on ticket sales, which tied our charitable contribution directly to the number of attendees we had and our ticket prices. That model made growth very hard, both for the event and for our beneficiary fundraising. Our efforts in more direct fundraising through charity raffles at the event and a greater emphasis on individual/guild driven donor drive campaigns as well as more direct involvement with our beneficiaries seems to be paying off in a big way and we’re very excited for the future.

Streamers: TimTam89, REDice14TTV, Lik Breezy; you guys have brought in $2,027 on your own so far! This event, we made some changes to work closer with our streamers and make sure they had the tools and information they needed to help spread our message and it made a colossal difference. Looking forward, we’re going to be finding more ways for them to interact with our event and attendees.

The MassiveLAN (Guild) Cup: This event we introduced new systems for claiming and tracking your guild points. Our “do it live” approach resulted in some bumps in the road for sure but overall we have a really good foundation that we’re going to continue to build on. Next event we also aim to have a MassiveLAN Cup information board to help explain how the point system works. We’re also looking to add more incentives for those participating.

Survey Feedback: We really appreciate your feedback. We read through it all every event and it really helps us to identify where we are and where we’re going as an event. There were a lot of submissions so we aren’t going to be able to touch on everything you submitted but here are a few highlights:

• Vendors: You guys like what we’re doing with the vendor area and we’re glad. If you know of any specific vendors you’d like to see, please let us know. If you personally know a vendor that you think would like to be at our event, let them know about the application on our website so we know they’re interested. 
• Food/Drink sales: As always we had calls for us to get food trucks or sell food/drinks ourselves. Unfortunately this just isn’t something we’re able to do based on contracts the concessions stand has with the Fairgrounds. However, we do continue to forward your survey responses to concessions to try and improve our options there.
• Games: This is a complex topic. Over the last few years our focus for tournament games has shifted from a roster of mostly traditionally competitive games to one that contains much more games that have a lower bar for entry, party games, and generally less competitive games. By tournament participation metrics it’s clear that our event does not really reflect a competitive gaming scene (shoutout to Golf With Your Friends, our biggest tournament of the event by participation. Many of those that respond in this area of the survey are looking for more formal competitive tournaments that we just aren’t aiming for. Others don’t know many people at the event and find it difficult to find people to meet and game with. The majority of our event is just groups of friends that want to spend some time together face to face which is great but obviously creates challenges for new people who are looking to get involved, which leads to the next topic…

Socializing at LAN: For those disappointed by how difficult it can be to really meet new people at the event: we hear you. As we plan for future events we’re going to make an effort to create more opportunities for people to make those new connections. We were surprised by the largely positive feedback we received for our BF6 tournament despite the somewhat chaos inducing limitation of having scrambled teams. There wasn’t a lot of explanation for why people liked it but we suspect it was in part newer attendees getting the opportunity to connect with others. We’re looking into more ways we can foster those kinds of interactions including more social games and potentially scheduled non-gaming social events.