There’s no other event in Australia quite like PAX. The atmosphere is incredible: it’s full of colour, there are smiles on every face and there is a sense of conviviality that is so often absent from the gaming community.
But PAX isn’t just the people. It’s also the costumes. The booths. The games. The panels. The toys. And the halls that house them all. You can see those, and more, in our photo wrap-up of the event after the jump.
Below you’ll see every photo from the last three days. I wasn’t able to just go around exclusively taking photos, so apologies for that — but hopefully what’s attached will give you a good enough guide of what you missed if you weren’t able to attend PAX. And if you want to get the stories that go behind the photos, go check out the rest of our coverage right here.
Comments
21 responses to “PAX Australia 2015, In Pictures”
@alexwalker – You may want to fix that link at the end.
Ah thanks a million mate. Still stuck in the media room slamming all manner of things. *sigh* I need a drink.
Thanks for the pictures and for coming to the meat
That was great fun! Genuinely one of the highlights of PAX for me. (Eminem hashtag Survivor cannot be forgotten)
Is that what Numbers sang, or CJ? I’m sure they were both equally … bad.
Does anybody have footage of the Stem video game challenge awards ceremony?
Nice pics Alex! Was also great to meet you!
You made the Expo Hall look a lot brighter than it actually seemed. 😛
Was nice to briefly meat you Alex, sorry I had an upset child with me both chances I had to talk to you. Although if it makes you feel better @markserrels spoken to loudly in Scottish and she cracked it at him as well
Cuteness overload with your kid. I look forward to seeing you guys next year!
Sorry you weren’t able to make it this year
Thanks for the pics and letting me live vicariously through them for PAX 2015. I’ve made a mental note not to overlap freakin’ family “holidays” (God, can I go back to work for a break yet?) over PAX weekend again. I’ve got at least one good mate who managed to pick up this year’s pins for me, so the year isn’t a complete write-off.
All-in-all, it looks like it was an incredibly similar event to PAX 2014 – and, for what it’s worth, I think that’s a good thing. Yug and team nailed it last year – and with the addition of Sony (Q: were they any good on the show floor?) there was little doubt that this year’s was going to be a ripper.
I’m already clearing the calendar for PAX 2016 🙂
Sony booth seemed to be mainly devoted to Playstation VR which admittedly of everything they have is the thing that they need to be showing off at a con. Enormous queues for it though. Also because of the timing, a lot of the AAA games on show were ones that are only a few weeks away from releasing which honestly isn’t that interesting. I don’t think it’d sway many purchasing decisions this close to release. The target market already knows about those games or else the marketing department dropped the ball badly.
I think the biggest improvement for the expo hall was the lack of the enormous League of Legends booth. It meant more space for everything else. Nothing against LoL but they were always going to be better off running things separately, or if they had to do stuff at PAX, do it in a dedicated theater.
Wasn’t a similarly massive space taken this time by MSY this year, anyway?
That’s a good picture of the Expo floor, cheers. I’m not really a LoL guy myself, but I grabbed a ticket to the event in a couple of weeks anyway just to support the eSport hype in Oz.
What’s missing from the pictures, the hugeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee lines. Waited almost 2 hours for a 10 minute demo of Uncharted 4 Multiplayer.
Pre-booking absolutely needs to be a thing. Shows a complete lack of respect for people’s time on the part of the organisers. You pay good money to get some of the limited places in the convention, but then they don’t bother even letting you book places at panels. I went to the first PAX AUS and ended up waiting in line for about 9 hours in total out of the two days I was there. If you could book places at least you’d be able to spend more time looking around, meeting up or playing games.
This is such a good idea. And if you’re not there within 2 minutes of your booking time, then your spot can go to some ‘standby’ queue for the poor souls who DO want to wait. @yugstar
That’s what I was thinking. Book online, no fee, but you have a standby queue to fill gaps left by no-shows. You’d have a queue for those with booked tickets and a queue for those without. The booked tickets could be attached to your ID with a limit of one ticket per event per PAX attendee (which would avoid ‘scalping’) and if you fail to show up at two or more events that you booked for, you could be blacklisted. This could be to combat the idea that people would just book every panel and then decide which ones to attend, although a better way might be to let people book for only one panel at any given timeslot, to avoid double-bookings.
Anyway, I’d really like to know why the PAX organisers don’t do something like this. Queuing time is basically wasted time, although I have seen people queuing on behalf of their mates (albeit only one or two mates – you’d probably get lynched if you tried to queue on behalf of more than that).
Would it maybe be better to have to book in-person at each spot? If it were online and easy to just put yourself on a whole slab of things throughout the day and have everything come up as full, preventing any further bookings and then leaving everyone else having to constantly refresh throughout the day to see if any slots have opened up thanks to no-show blacklistings.
Maybe the badges could be set up to have a QR code or something on them so that you just stick them in a slot on the machine and it marks you down as an entry for that event. If you’ve come along after the last booked seat, then you get put down as a standby ticket. So there’d be two lines for the event, the booked seats and the standby ones. I guess entry for booked tickets would only have to be open for a limited time so they can open it up to standby, where any of the booked ones who haven’t made it miss out/go into the standby queue. Also the standby queue would have to be ordered, so maybe they would need a printed ticket with a number on it so you know where your place is…
Hmm. Complex issue 😛
Loved the wombat picture – More wombat pictures!!
I’d just call that poor decision making on your part! 😛 Not the exhibitor disrespecting your time. That said, there is no way I would have been able to have a go at the Alienware VR without pre-booking. Even then, I had to walk straight to it first thing on Saturday to get a slot. The space station VR thing eventually turned to pre-booking too on Sunday, after having massive lines before that. Pre-booking is good, but you can’t blame the exhibitors for your choice to stand in a line. You have free will after all!