MomoCon set an attendance record. Next year, it’s planning to be even bigger.

By comparison, the country’s largest anime convention, the Anime Expo in Los Angeles, occupies about 800,000 square feet of space for its 100,000-plus attendees.

MomoCon is one of the largest fan conventions held in the Southeast. It’s a four-day, annual affair that attracts attendees from across the U.S. and countries as far as Sweden, Vietnam and Liechtenstein, among others.

The convention’s size and its attendance is a far cry from its beginning as a small, on-campus event at Georgia Tech. That first year, 700 people attended the convention.

Organizers have gradually increased their space since relocating to the Congress Center in 2015, said MomoCon’s co-chairman, Chris Stuckey, who helped steer its growth to a major convention.

That first year in the Congress Center, MomoCon occupied only part of Hall A, the smallest and oldest building, and didn’t even need all of it, Stuckey said. But the next year the convention did need the space, and expanded to the full hall.

Two years later, organizers put in a request to switch to Hall B, which was nearly double the space than the first hall. They didn’t move to the space until 2022, MomoCon’s first full in-person event after the pandemic, and it added more space in 2024.

Next year, MomoCon will be occupying all of Halls A and B. Instead of splitting the exhibitor and gaming spaces across one hall, the exhibitor space will expand to all of Hall B. The gaming section, which includes esports stages, console tournaments, tabletop gaming and free play, will move to Hall A.

Stuckey credits part of the increasing attendance to the multiplier effect: If one attendee enjoys themselves, they’ll likely invite their friends the next year, who in turn invite their friends the following year and so on.

“That’s the first and biggest impact that any event has,” Stuckey said. “For events, like when you go to the movies, most people don’t go to the movies themselves. They bring a friend or family member because it’s a communal experience. And conventions like MomoCon are very much a communal experience.”

Part of building this audience has to do with being on the forefront of what’s new in gaming, animation and comics and understanding the directions in which fandoms evolve, Stuckey said. Organizers have a track record of identifying trends before they become popular.

MomoCon was one of the first conventions to bring out the voice actors of first-person shooter game Overwatch before the game became somewhat of an overnight success in 2017, as an example. Plus, organizers have a strong understanding of how to approach marketing, Stuckey said.

Organizers are already planning new guests and activities for the next year. They’re having to decide if they want to create events and programming to attract new types of attendees or focus on their core audience.

There’s a trade-off here, Stuckey said. If they branch out into the sci-fi and fantasy genres, for example, they’re attracting people who would’ve otherwise never attended the convention, but they’ll also lose part of their niche appeal.

He points to the San Diego Comic Con and how some longtime attendees complain about how commercialized it has become.

“While there is something to be said about Comic Con being a big value to the con community, there are different reasons that people go to it versus why they go to our show,” Stuckey said. “I think the number one reason people go to our show is community. It’s a community of people that like animation, gaming and comics, and it would be somewhat of a betrayal to suddenly also be sci-fi, fantasy and pop culture, broad show.”

There are tons of new avenues organizers can pursue within animation, gaming and comics that they haven’t done already, Stuckey said. There are always more partnerships they can strike with companies, new talent and creators they can bring out and different gaming environments they can add to their lineup.

This is a direction of growth that keeps MomoCon true to what it is, Stuckey said, and how they want to run the event going forward.

This column has been adapted from the June edition of The Scene, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s LinkedIn newsletter about all things in the Georgia entertainment business. Keep up with the latest insider news about what’s happening in the business of film, music and TV by subscribing on the AJC‘s LinkedIn page.