Tips for a gamer trying to make money for PAX East..

[blangblang14]

Hey Everyone! I need some advice from the gaming community. I would love, more than anything, to attend PAX East this April, but financial matters are keeping me from attending currently. I am not lazy nor am I jobless, I currently am a sales associate at EB games in Canada, I am just a student. Now, I work as much as I possibly can and try to get extra hours whenever the opportunity presents itself. The problem is my school is in my city about an hour away from where I live and I have to drive myself everyday. Though my car may be good on fuel, having to drive five days a week bi-weekly has me strapped for cash. I would really appreciate it if I could get some tips from the escapist community on how to earn the money I need, about two-thousand dollars, to make it to the event. I was thinking about something online so I could do it a school. Even though I work at EB Games I do actually know quite a bit about video games. Any and All tips and pointers are appreciated.

 

[Zantos]

When I had to travel quite far for college, I found a few people that also had to travel and we car-shared. It cuts down on fuel costs a lot to split between 3 or 4 people. If you don't know anyone in your immediate friends, you can probably find some people just by putting out an ad or something like that.

 

[blangblang14]

Well, I am car pooling with one guy right now but I could try getting more people as well.

 

[Beautiful End]

Same situation here. I work at GameStop and I wanna go badly.

I would advice getting a plane ticket, plain and simple. Get the cheapest one you can find. The money spent between the gas fares and food and stuff like that if you carpool are gonna be around the same than if you take a plane and just get there in 4 hours or so.

Now, that's not gonna be your problem. The fares for PAX are what you really need to save for, assuming you want the All-Access pass.
Since you mentioned you work at EB Games too, have you tried asking if you get some sort of discount for going to PAX? The manager at my store mentioned something about GameStop being able to send one GA to PAX as an "informant" for free. Of course, the chances of them picking a Game Advisor are...slim, but it's worth the shot. They might even give you a discount.

If not, how about hosting a video game tournament? You could ask your manager to help you out and host one for whatever reason. Think of an upcoming game that has a two-player mode and boom! You're good. Twisted Metal comes to mind since it's gonna be a new release and it needs advertisement. I myself haven't tried that before at my store so I don't know if that's allowed. But you can always host one on your own at your school. Get a couple of friends to help you out, get a room (No pun intended), get your system, get a big TV, charge $2-5 per entry, get some drinks/popcorn and you're good. As a gift, you can give someone a $50 gift card for EB games or something. Believe me, people just wanna go there to play and $50 is not much if you consider the possible profits, assuming that everything goes well.

I hope that kinda helps.