DreamHack have announced they will no longer be selling BYOC tickets for their festivals, citing the fact that the tickets make up “less than 10%” of attendees as the main reason.

That makes it sound like it isn’t a big deal, but the story isn’t actually that simple.

Whilst it may be true that only 10% of the tickets are bought by BYOC enjoyers, that’s actually because DH only allow 10% to purchase the tickets, whereas regular tickets are more or less unlimited. Nice way to cook the books, lads.

Of course, it probably is true that interest in the BYOC element has declined over the years. A peak of almost 10k tickets sold in 2013 was always going to be hard to match, but is 10% of a massive festival really not enough to justify it?

Maybe not, but only if the overall isn’t as high as EFG would like it to be. Which, considering we were at DH Birmingham earlier in the year, might actually have some truth to it, considering how barren it was outside of the COD event.

Which was wicked, btw.

If that is true, though, it certainly doesn’t bode well for the future of the classic DreamHack, and it wouldn’t surprise us if they do eventually just become a place for EFG to host multiple events at once.

And if you ask us, that’s a real shame.

Fortunately, though, if you are looking to attend a BYOC, there are still opportunities. There are numerous in the US, and here in the UK, we obviously have EPIC. As for former DH hotspots, look for OWN Valencia in, well, Valencia, Glitched if you’re in Sweden, and Caggtus LAN if you were formerly a DreamHack Leipzig frequenter.

Long live grassroots CS.