I've been working on lan.events, a platform for organizing and discovering LAN parties and gaming events. I started going to LAN parties as a kid, took a long break as a young adult, then got back into it in 2025 thanks to my friend Ben. We hit DreamHack together, which led me to PDXLAN in the fall.
Why lan.events?
Existing ticketing platforms don't work well for LAN parties. Before building something new, I wanted to understand what's already out there and where the gaps are.
Market research
The ticketing space has a few big players, each serving different parts of the market:
Market leaders
| Platform | US Market Share | Global Scale | Primary Focus |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ticketmaster | 63-70% | 620M+ tickets/year | Large-scale live events, major venues |
| Eventbrite | 31% | 290M+ tickets/year | Self-service, small to medium events |
| See Tickets | ~20-25% (UK) | International | European/international markets |
| Tixr | 0.68% | 2,300+ companies | Music festivals, EDM events |
Market share visualization
US Online Ticket Sales Market Share (2024)
Platform positioning
Ticketmaster owns the big event space. They have exclusive deals with over 12,000 venues worldwide and handle most major concerts, sports, and theater. They're so dominant that the DOJ sued them in 2024 for being a monopoly.
Eventbrite is different—it's built for organizers who want to run their own events. It works well for smaller, community-driven events where you need flexibility.
See Tickets is big in Europe (especially the UK where they have 20-25% market share). CTS Eventim bought them in 2024, so they're expanding internationally.
Tixr is small and focused on music festivals and EDM events. They serve a couple thousand companies but have less than 1% of the market.
The problem for LAN events
"Ticketing platforms" is a bit of a misnomer. They come with a lot of features tailored mostly to large scale events. The nature of software as a service is that whether you need those features the cost of those systems is still built into the price of the service.
LAN events need different things: multi-day support, seat assignments for gaming stations, tournament brackets, community features. There's nothing to say that a similar and more generic festival-scale platform couldn't be built on top of or alongside such features but it'd need to be designed from the ground up to be that way.
lan.events
That's where lan.events fits in; with lower margins and features built specifically for LAN events, I'm building something that actually serves this community. Better flexibility, better pricing, and features that make sense for what LAN organizers actually need.
While I somewhat doubt lan.events will make me a fortune I'm confident that it will be profitable and can serve the gaming community for years to come.