Gen Con 2025 in Review: 72,000 People, a Gundam Launch, and a Tariff Hangover

A year later, the number everyone still quotes from Gen Con 2025 is 72,000. The number that actually explains the show is 575.

Gen Con Indy 2025 ran July 31 to August 3 at the Indiana Convention Center and sold out. Gen Con's own post-show release calls it a "record-breaking, sold-out crowd of nearly 72,000 attendees and more than 575 exhibiting companies," with nearly 30,000 events and activities and an estimated $82 million in local economic impact. The attendance record is the headline. The exhibitor count is the story, because 2024's show ran roughly 540 exhibitors against roughly 71,000 people. Attendance moved about a point. Exhibitors moved about seven.

That is a hall filling up with companies that decided a booth was worth it, in a year when a lot of them were bleeding money on freight and duties. Both of those things were true in the same building, and the four days made more sense once you held them together.

The short version

Four things happened at Gen Con 2025 that were still shaping the hobby a year on. Bandai used the show as the North American launch platform for the Gundam Card Game, six days after its first booster hit shelves. Riot brought Riftbound to a shared booth and deliberately sold nothing. Ravensburger bought the co-sponsor slot and built a three-card promo funnel around it. And Paizo shipped Starfinder Second Edition into the biggest room in North American tabletop.

Under all of it, publishers were quoting six-figure tariff bills to anyone with a notepad.

The numbers Gen Con 2025 actually posted

Straight from Gen Con's press releases, with the caveat that two of these disagree:

Note the exhibitor split. Gen Con said 595 vendors going in and "more than 575 exhibiting companies" coming out, four days apart, both in its own copy. Those are almost certainly two different definitions — booth spaces versus companies, or a pre-show list that had a few drops — but Gen Con has not published the definitions, so the honest version is "somewhere around 575 to 595," and either way it is the highest the show has posted.

For scale on the charity line: Gen Con says it has raised almost $500,000 for charity since 2003, so 2025 alone was roughly eight percent of two decades of giving.

Bandai launched Gundam, then launched it again at Gen Con

The Gundam Card Game had existed at retail for exactly twenty days when Gen Con opened.

Bandai's rollout was tight and public. Four starter decks landed July 11, 2025 at $11.99 each — Heroic Beginnings [ST01], Wings of Advance [ST02], Zeon's Rush [ST03] and SEED Strike [ST04], each a ready-to-play 50-card deck. The first booster set, Newtype Rising [GD01], followed on July 25 at $4.99 for a 12+1 card pack, with 130+6 card types drawn from Mobile Suit Gundam, Gundam Wing, Gundam SEED, Gundam Unicorn and The Witch from Mercury.

Six days after that booster, Bandai was in the Indiana Convention Center running First Combat, which Bandai's own event page describes as "the first large-scale tournament event to celebrate the worldwide release of the Gundam Card Game," with the North American leg held at Gen Con. Around it: Learn to Play trial sessions that handed out a randomly assigned demo deck, a Gundam Assemble painting workshop with no game demo attached, and starter decks, Gundam Assemble starter sets and GD01 boosters on sale at the Bandai Card Games booth in limited quantities.

That sequencing is not an accident. If you are launching a TCG worldwide and you want the game's first serious North American tournament to have an audience, you hold it in the largest tabletop hall on the continent, three weeks after people can buy the product and while every shop buyer in the industry is in the same city. Bandai treated Gen Con as a distribution event, not a marketing one — there was product on the counter and a competitive event with a real name attached.

If you are coming to the game now, our Gundam Card Game rules walkthrough and starter deck breakdown cover the ST01 to ST04 decks that were being sold at that booth.

Two promo cards, two completely different asks

Bandai gave away two Resource promos at Gen Con 2025, and the difference between how you got them is the most interesting thing on that event page.

Resource: Suletta Mercury (RP-009) went to people who participated in First Combat or Learn to Play. You had to sit down and play the game.

Resource: Heero Yuy (RP-001), non-foil, went to anyone who showed booth staff they were following the official Gundam Card Game social accounts. You had to tap follow.

One card is priced in attention, one in time. That is a publisher running two acquisition funnels off the same booth and measuring them separately, and it is worth noticing because most TCG convention promos only do the first one.

The card choice is also smarter than it looks. Both promos are Resource cards. Resources are the one thing every Gundam deck runs regardless of colour or which series it is built around, which makes a promo Resource universally playable in a way a flashy Unit alt-art never is. It is the closest thing the game has to a promo basic land — pure table presence, zero deckbuilding cost. Note as well that Bandai's published images of both cards are proofs, carrying diagonal SAMPLE lettering and a NOT FOR SALE line; those are the announcement assets, not scans of the distributed card.

Riftbound turned up with nothing to sell

Riot's League of Legends TCG took the exact opposite approach in the same hall.

Riftbound shared a traditional booth with publishing partner UVS Games. It ran demos in both 1v1 and four-player free-for-all, showed the foil chase cards from the Origins set in English for the first time, and handed the first English Riftbound promo card to people who did a demo. Riot's own pre-show announcement is blunt about the rest: the company said it would not have any Riftbound product for sale at the show. The English release was still months out, arriving in late October 2025.

So: Bandai sold boxes, Riot sold nothing. Both were correct. Bandai had a product on shelves and needed players; Riot had a product months out and needed the demo hours and the first wave of English-language impressions to be good. A convention booth is not one tool. Riftbound's 2026 Gen Con footprint — 52 ticketed events in the catalog — is the payoff on demo hours banked in 2025. If you want the game itself, we have a Riftbound rules primer.

Lorcana paid to be everywhere

Ravensburger came in as a Gen Con 2025 co-sponsor with Disney Lorcana at booth 2001, and built three promos with three different unlock conditions:

• Goofy – Emerald Champion, a preview card from the then-upcoming Whispers in the Well set, for buying Lorcana product at the booth.
• Pluto – Tried and True, for registering for Lorcana gameplay events.
• Anna – Ice Breaker, for completing the Collection Quest and turning in a finished card set.

Buy, play, walk the floor. Three behaviours, three cards, and a preview card as the bait on the one that costs money. Lorcana's Gen Con 2025 showing also doubled as its two-year anniversary moment and carried set reveals off the back of it. Our Lorcana at Gen Con 2026 piece picks the thread up a year later.

The RPG side: Starfinder 2E and the ENnies

Gen Con is still where roleplaying games launch, and 2025 was a heavy year for it.

Paizo shipped Starfinder Second Edition at the show — Starfinder Player Core plus the Era of the Eclipse and Murder in Metal City releases — after a public playtest year, built to be compatible with Pathfinder Second Edition. Paizo also put out Pathfinder Battlecry! and announced Starfinder Afterlight, a CRPG with EpicTellers. Paizo's own wrap-up puts its convention footprint at over 1,100 games run for more than 5,000 players in the Sagamore Ballroom, staffed by over 200 volunteers.

The ENnie Awards, announced August 1, went three ways. Avantris Entertainment's Crooked Moon took five Golds. Darrington Press's Daggerheart took three Golds and a Silver, with Darrington picking up another Gold for its Get Your Sheet Together video series. Son of Oak's Legend in the Mist took two Golds and four Silvers. 2025 was also the first year the ENnies ran a Best Solo Game category, which tells you something about where the RPG market had drifted.

The tariff bill sitting under the record

Here is the part the attendance headline buried.

Board game publishers spent Gen Con 2025 doing tariff arithmetic in public. Cephalofair COO Price Johnson put his company's recent bill at "north of $100k this last month, down the drain, no benefit gained." Portal Games founder Ignacy Trzewiczek was less polite about it. Gen Con president David Hoppe acknowledged that tariffs had been "hugely problematic, both from the threat they create" — the president of the show, on the record, during the show. The Op and Gale Force Nine were both absent from the 2025 hall, with tariff uncertainty cited as part of the reason.

Hold that against the exhibitor rebound and you get the actual shape of the year: demand was up and supply-side economics were ugly at the same time. A record crowd does not mean a healthy P&L. Anyone reading 72,000 as proof the hobby was fine in 2025 was reading one number out of two.

What 2025 set up for 2026

Most of the bets placed in that hall paid.

Gundam went from twenty days old at Gen Con 2025 to multiple sets deep by 2026. Riftbound went from nothing-for-sale to 52 ticketed events in the 2026 catalog. Lorcana's Whispers in the Well preview card became a shipped set. Gen Con itself sold out again in 2026, running July 30 to August 2, and remains contracted in Indianapolis through 2030, with a convention centre expansion and the Signia hotel in progress — Visit Indy walked Gen Con executives through the construction on a hard-hat tour during the 2025 show.

One comparison to avoid: Gen Con said "nearly 30,000 events and activities" for 2025, while the public event database lists 27,467 ticketed events for 2026. Those are different measures — one is Gen Con's own count including activities, the other is the ticketed catalog — and putting them side by side to claim the show shrank would be wrong. For the 2026 show as it actually ran, see our Gen Con 2026 planning guide, the non-gaming programming and the zoom-out on the 2026 hall.

What we could not confirm

Being straight about the gaps, because a retrospective is only useful if you know where it stops:

• There is no public per-category event breakdown for 2025. The community event database at gencon.eventdb.us currently carries the 2026 catalog. That means we can give you exact 2026 event counts by game and no equivalent 2025 counts, so nothing in this post claims a 2025 events-per-game figure.
• The exhibitor number is a range, not a point. 595 pre-show and "more than 575" post-show are both Gen Con's, and the company has not published what each counts.
• Attendance is a single published figure. Gen Con released "nearly 72,000" without splitting unique attendees from turnstile counts, so it cannot be compared cleanly to shows that report differently.
• Print runs for RP-001 and RP-009 are not published. Bandai stated the distribution conditions, not the quantities. Secondary-market prices are not a substitute for a print figure and we are not treating them as one.
• First Combat's Gen Con results are not in Bandai's public archive in a form we could cite, so this post does not name placings or decklists from that event.