The Fan Convention Grows Up, and B2B Operators Are Buying

Fan conventions used to sit at the hobbyist edge of the events business. Comic cons, gaming expos and cosplay gatherings were consumer shows, a world apart from the B2B trade shows where the professional operators and the institutional money lived. That line appears to be disappearing.

Large organizers and investors began pouring serious capital into fan and pop-culture events more than a decade ago, but the push has accelerated in recent years. In 2024, Informa’s Fan Expo HQ acquired VidCon from Paramount Global. This April, MARI—the live-events holding company launched by Ari Emanuel and backed by Apollo, RedBird Capital, the Qatar Investment Authority and Ares—acquired Collect-A-Con, the trading-card and pop-culture convention circuit.

In February, Saudi Arabia’s Qiddiya completed a full takeover of the fighting-game championship EVO. The buyers of these B2C events are no longer just event companies; they are private-equity firms, sovereign wealth funds and diversified operators that have decided a passionate consumer audience is an asset worth owning.

For large B2B operators like Informa and RX, the appeal of the consumer space is straightforward. While a traditional trade show sells access to a market a few days a year, a fan community shows up at a fandom event entirely by choice, returns year after year and organizes its identity around a shared passion.

“Ten thousand people who organize part of their identity around something can be more powerful than 100,000 casual attendees,” said Lance Fensterman, CEO of Fanatics Events and the former president of ReedPop, RX’s fandom event division.

He added that the average attendee stays for about seven hours at Fanatics Fest, an annual New York City sports and collectibles festival, which Fanatics said drew 200,000 visitors to the Javits Center in July. “That is very deep, very meaningful and very robust engagement that is hard to find in another medium—that has immense value,” he said.

Bringing a Grassroots Asset to Market

A fan community’s true value, and what a buyer is actually acquiring, comes into sharp focus when a passion event is put up for sale.

André Kuschel is doing exactly that. His German fantasy convention RolePlay Verse, launched in 2024, brings tabletop and pen-and-paper role-playing, live-action role-play, cosplay, a medieval market and game exhibitors together in Oberhausen, Germany.

It drew about 10,000 visitors in its first year and about 12,000 in 2025, according to Kuschel, filling the venue to capacity. Now he is shopping it to strategic buyers.

“We are primarily looking for a strategic buyer, an organization that understands the format, respects the community and has the international network to scale it successfully,” he said, adding that the founding team is committed to staying operationally involved after a sale.

Kuschel’s pitch to prospective buyers is that the asset is the community itself, the “direct relationships with creators, cosplayers, exhibitors and fans who return because the event feels genuinely theirs.”

Under the wrong owner, he said, “the biggest risk is replacing community-first decision-making with pure commercialization.”

His wariness is not abstract. Before RolePlay Verse, Kuschel built RolePlay Convention, which grew from a 2007 debut in Münster into one of Europe’s largest fantasy events before moving to the Koelnmesse fairgrounds in Cologne. Kuschel says he sold the event to Koelnmesse and stayed on to run it, until Koelnmesse folded it into CCXP Cologne in 2018. That event has not been held since its 2019 debut, after its planned follow-up editions were suspended during the pandemic. “Events like this depend on operational closeness to the community and clear, independent ownership structures,” he said. “Institutional scaling can put that closeness at risk.”

What the Money Is Really Buying

The companies acquiring fandom events describe the underlying asset in almost the same terms. Greg Topalian, who helped create New York Comic Con, later ran Clarion Events in North America and now runs venture capital and consulting firm OnDeck Ventures, said a buyer gets the brand and the intellectual property, but “mostly they are buying access to the community.”

In return, he said, an event gains cash to invest and staff to professionalize the experience. The key, he said, is keeping it “authentic and built around the hearts and minds of the fans.”

“The financial model says you’re acquiring revenue, EBITDA, customer data and an event brand, but what you’re really buying is trust,” Fensterman said. “You’re buying permission from a community to convene them.”

The mistake investors sometimes make, he added, is believing that because they bought the event, they bought the fandom. “You didn’t. You have to re-earn that permission every year.”

That trust is also what lets a big owner leave money on the table. Fensterman said Fanatics stopped selling VIP tickets at its events and used them to reward top customers instead, taking the revenue hit because the value returns across Fanatics One, its loyalty program.

“We make hundreds of decisions where we could extract more value and choose not to because we think the experience needs oxygen,” he said. Some organizers may not have that option, he added, but there are other ways to trade revenue for goodwill, such as a comic con handing out free tickets to anyone in costume.

Marie Browne, senior vice president and head of ReedPop at RX Global, who was on the founding team of New York Comic Con, framed acquisition as a duty rather than a purchase.

“These communities don’t necessarily belong to us, they belong to the fans who built them over the years, so we have to really be good stewards of that trust,” she said. “RX doesn’t make ReedPop more corporate; RX gives ReedPop more resources to invest in the fan experience.”

What tells her a community is worth buying, she added, is less the financials than the passion. “Will these fans attend if the weather is bad, and are they really committed to the event?”

What Growth Puts at Risk

The quickest way to break a fan event, Topalian said, is “overly aggressive growth plans. Too many tickets sold, increased prices, crazy service fees, nickel and diming the fan with extra costs.”

Institutional capital reliably improves production, safety, marketing and reach, Fensterman said, but it can also quietly erode what made the event special.

“The thing I worry about losing is the weirdness,” he said. “Grassroots events often succeed because somebody obsessed with something made decisions no MBA would have approved. The quirks, the rituals, the things that don’t scale, that’s often where the soul lives.”

Professionalization can improve a show, he said, “but if you’re not careful, you professionally manage away exactly what made people love it.”

The unique character that some fear will be eroded is also what certain buyers say scale is meant to protect.

According to Aman Gupta, president of Informa’s B2C North America business, “The goal is to protect and maintain what makes an event special, then add what we do best.”

He pointed to MEGACON Orlando, acquired by Informa in 2015, which he said has more than doubled its attendance to rank among the top three comic conventions in North America.

The earliest sign a new owner is losing a community, Fensterman said, is “when you start making decisions about the community without people from that community in the room.”

He pointed to PAX, the Penny Arcade Expo, as an example of an organizer getting it right. ReedPop put its logo on the show, he said, but “to this day, ReedPop personalities are not the face; it remains Penny Arcade community leaders.”

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