Every year since the debut of the iPad (and the iPhone before it), WWDC has sold out exponentially faster. In 2008, it took two months for tickets to sell out; one year later, they sold out in a month. In 2010, the year the iPad debuted, WWDC was sold out in a week. In 2011, it was sold out only 12 hours. Last year, tickets were gone after just two hours. I’m not sure if it CAN realistically sell out any faster than two minutes.
Conferences selling out isn’t a new thing. PAX Prime passes sold out in six hours this year. Blizzard has to batch their tickets to give more people an opportunity to buy them. Both of those conferences allow for a much larger base audience - PAX Prime stopped releasing the number of attendees after 2011 when they hit 70,000. In 2011, Blizzcon drew 26,000 attendees to announce Mists of Pandaria.
Between the size of the conference center (Moscone West in San Francisco) and trying to allow for personal attention from Apple engineers, WWDC can only accommodate roughly 5000 developers. 5000 developers today got their golden tickets in the length of time it would have taken them to get up from the computer and relieve themselves. Everyone else was unfortunately not fast enough on the click.
For those developers who missed out, Apple has been releasing videos of most or all of the sessions at WWDC to registered developers shortly after the conclusion of WWDC. Last year, they had the videos up only four days after the conference ended. So while the majority of Apple developers may miss the chance to schmooze with their fellow game makers and productivity app developers, at least they’ll still be able to keep up with the latest developments.
