I’ve been hearing rumors of this for the last week, but now it’s official – the DX3 conference is cancelled. Although I was not planning to speak or attend DX3, I’m still sad, because it would have meant a lot of friends would have been in town. Oh well.
This article in eweek gives some more details on the reasons why it was canceled. Now, naturally, they are not going to come out and say, “Our prices were inflated beyond what the average attendee was willing to pay personally, so we didn’t get enough ticket sales.” But I can’t help but think that $1000 – $1500 per ticket scared a lot of people away.
Reasons given were, “the tight timing of our Dx3 event in relation to recent announcements of new Microsoft and Adobe technologies, as well as competing industry events.” Competing events, maybe, but I don’t see how announcements of MS and Adobe products would hurt conference sales. I guess maybe that people want to save their money so they can buy the new products? Well, again, if admission wasn’t the same or more than some of the CS3 suites, that might help things.
OK, obviously I’m on a pricing kick here. And I think $1000 to $1500 is just way to much for a conference. I already blogged about this before, and got almost universal agreement that this price range was ridiculous. It may be a drop in the bucket for corporations sending their employees, but for the individual attendee, the self-employed developer/designer, the enthusiastic noob, the student, it’s a big chunk of change. And it’s this latter group that has built the community into what it is, not the big corporations.
Anyway, it will be interesting to see what will happen with FlashForward this fall, also by Lynda.com, also in Boston, also with ticket prices of $900 to $1500, and also most likely close in time to other events and product releases.