‘Tis the season… for Comic-Con.
San Diego Comic-Con is the biggest (and in our humble opinions, the best) convention around, the closest thing we’ve found to the feeling of “Christmas in July”. Badges for 2026 were on many people’s wishlists, and the final badge sale — Open Registration — was today, marking the final chance to unwrap a badge for next year’s convention.
So, did Santa deliver?
IT’S THE MOST WONDERFUL TIME OF THE YEAR
Last year’s Open Registration sale was met with some pretty large technical issues, to the point where the first attempt at the sale had to be paused, canceled, and rescheduled completely. So this go-around, it felt obvious that Comic-Con and Configio (the platform the sale runs on) were working behind-the-scenes to slow the sale down and keep things working at a slower, but steady, pace. We’ll take that any day over technical issues.
The waiting room opened right on time at 7:30am PT, and just like with Returning Registration this year, featured a background image that only loaded on some devices. However, unlike Returning Registration, whose background behind the image featured a white screen (making the white text on top virtually impossible to read), they had a black background this time. So even if the image didn’t load, it was still readable. A small, simple adjustment, that made for a big difference in stress levels.
We didn’t hear anything on issues for the waiting room prior to the sale kicking off at 9am.
A TOUCAN IN A PEAR TREE
Once the clock hit 9am users pages were automatically refreshed and those in the waiting room were randomly assigned places “in line” and given both an estimated time as well as a Toucan, who either flew very quickly, or took his sweet time making his way across the page.
Immediately, some were able to get through.
Most users reported initial wait times of “more than an hour”, but those quickly started to lower.
From here, it was a slow and steady path to selling out. Preview Night took a bit longer to sell out than expected — 46 minutes, compared to 42 last year (which was already slow). For reference, that’s also significantly higher than Returning Registration’s 32 minutes. We’ll get into our thoughts on why at the end.
The next day to sell out was Saturday, which also took longer than expected. Saturday finally ran out at 74 minutes, which was longer than both last year’s 64 minutes, and last month’s 65 minutes in Returning Registration.
This was followed by Friday badges at 89 minutes — again up significantly from last year’s 75 minutes, as well as Returning Registration’s 70. At this point, we were already over the time it took for all badges to sell out in Returning Registration.
Thursday and Sunday have historically sold out at roughly the same time, with Thursday sometimes going a few minutes earlier. That was the case today, when Thursday finally sold out at a whopping 144 minutes into the sale, up from 106 minutes last year, and 84 minutes last month in Returning Registration.
Now here’s where things get interesting. At this point, we noticed you could join the waiting room and get through in only 3 to 4 minutes. What does that mean? If you join the waiting room after 9am, you’re sent to the back of the line — so that means there was both hardly anyone still in line, and that at this point, you could join and still immediately purchase badges. Since the implementation of the online lotteries for badge sales, that has never happened.
We wondered briefly if there was a world in which Sunday might not sell out at all today, and they might call the sale. However, this proved to be false, as Sunday sold out relatively quickly after, at 149 minutes. That’s up a whopping 36 minutes from last year’s 113 sale run time, and almost double Returning Registration’s 89 minutes.
A LUMP OF COAL FOR YOU
Compared to the badge sales from last year, this was a walk in the park — but as always, there were a few that experienced issues.
Some reported being kicked back to the Queue once selected. There’s any number of reasons this could have happened — we saw someone who had a VPN on, which Comic-Con had recommended against — but there were surely other reasons, including down to simply the site itself glitching out for whatever reason.
There were other issues, as well, including buffering.
But for the most part, the sale seemed very smooth — and most who we saw with issues were able to get back in and ultimately purchase badges.
OVERVIEW & NEXT STEPS
This was definitely an interesting sale.
On the one end, in our opinions, it was a huge success. There were barely any technical issues. — a huge win. And considering that you could still join the queue for the last few minutes, it seems as though if you were happy with attending even a single day of Comic-Con, you could do exactly that.
But the fact that you could do that was also definitely not normal. Here is a look at the sale times for the last several years, to give you a better understanding of how slow, and weird, this was (and also because we love stats here at the UBlog):
- 2014: Open Reg: 72 minutes / Returning Reg: 155 minutes
- 2015: Open Reg: 45 minutes / Returning Reg: 47 minutes
- 2016: Open Reg: 55 minutes / Returning Reg: 77 minutes
- 2017: Open Reg: 72 minutes / Returning Reg: 58 minutes
- 2018: Open Reg: 64 minutes / Returning Reg: 73 minutes
- 2019: Open Reg: 72 minutes / Returning Reg: 52 minutes
- 2020: Open Reg: 66 minutes / Returning Reg: 59 minutes
- 2023: Open Reg: 76 minutes / Returning Reg: 96 minutes
- 2024: Open Reg: 74 minutes / Returning Reg: 89 minutes
- 2025: Open Reg: 113 minutes / Returning Reg: 100 minutes
- 2026 Open Reg: 149 / Returning Reg: 88 minutes
149 minutes is the highest sale run time for both Open and Returning Registration since all the way back in 2014, when Returning Registration took 155 minutes. Since then, the sale times have only even cracked 100 minutes before twice — last year, which were the two sales plagued by widespread glitches, unlike today.
The difference in time between Open Registration and Returning Registration also hasn’t been as wide since 2014, either.
So all of that said… what does it actually mean?
We think there’s a few things at play. We strongly suspect that Comic-Con and Configio have started letting people through slower in general, possibly as a counter-measure to last year’s glitchy sales. It’s also possible that they allocated more badges than usual to Open Registration compared to Returning Registration, but the Returning Registration sale was not significantly shorter than usual.
But we also think simply… demand may be down ever so slightly. Comic-Con is still the only comic convention that could (and does) sell out to this level on the same day, so we’re talking a very, very small drop in interest here. But considering you could theoretically join the sale towards the end of the wait time and walk away with at least a Sunday badge, that’s a far cry from the demand of the past. There’s a million reasons for this — the economy isn’t great, everyone’s budgets are tighter, many don’t want to travel internationally right now for a myriad of reasons.
But it’s certainly worth thinking about, and paying attention to.
Again, hopefully the ultimate takeaway today is that everyone should have been able to walk away with at least one badge day… and we’re counting that as a big win.
