The WWDC Ticket Problem
WWDC sold out in two minutes, but it didn’t really sell out because there were all kinds of problems and Apple is still distributing tickets and trying to make it right. If nothing else, it seems like they should make it a true lottery, rather than making it a lottery masquerading as a race. So let folks sign up in a 24-hour window, and then draw lots to see who can buy tickets. It’d be better than what happened this year, but not at all satisfying. Assuming WWDC stays the same, and demand stays the same (or grows), I wonder if there’s a way to make it more fun, fair, or interesting (or all of the above).
I originally thought that five bad lotteries might be better than one bad lottery, so maybe you’d divvy up the 5,000 tickets like so:
- 2,000 (or 1,000) tickets to a lottery for folks who have never been before.
- 1,000 (or 2,000) tickets to a lottery for folks who have been before.
- 1,000 tickets auctioned off to the highest bidders.
- 500 tickets for the first people to solve 500 different puzzles, or some other game/challenge. Or maybe mined via some Bitcoin-style approach. Or maybe you earn chances in a lottery by dedicating processing power to folding proteins, or curing cancer, something like that.
- 500 tickets to Apple invitees.
It felt decent when I first posted, but then I mowed the lawn and the more I mowed the stupider it felt. Maybe the approach above lets you tweak the distribution of old hands and newcomers and folks with deep pockets and clever people, but you probably get something like that mix just leaving it to chance. And the 1,500 tickets going to auction and to the puzzle solvers just feel too much like giving them to people that have extra time and/or money.
By the time I was done mowing I was back to a lottery, but with a twist: instead of each person getting one chance in this lottery (since you need an active developer account to play), I like the idea of being able to earn extra chances in the lottery. Some ideas below. Obviously you’d use or not use some (or all) of these (and change the weights) depending on how you wanted to tweak the audience composition.
- Having an active developer account: 10 chances.
- Having no apps in the app store: 10 chances (if you want to bring in more newcomers)
- Having at least one app in the app store : 10 chances (if you don’t want complete newcomers)
- One chance per $X in sales.
- One chance per consecutive year with an active developer account.
- Entering the lottery and losing: keep your existing chances, plus get 10 more for next year.
- Entering the lottery and winning: pay half your chances in addition to ticket price.
- Chances handed out by Apple for, I dunno, evangelism? Advancing the cause? Doing something cool? Writing a great app that makes use of new APIs? Building an app with great accessibility? Running a conference? Giving a good talk at a conference?
This last one, that Apple can give out chances throughout the year for cool things, I’m liking. It just seems fun. “Achievement unlocked” kind of thing. Heck, part of me really likes the idea of hiding all the tickets in a big online game, but I also recently read the wonderful Ready Player One, so that’s probably what that’s all about.
Finally, while this is fun to think about, I can’t imagine anything like this would ever actually happen. Overcomplicated, and therefore almost certainly less fair than a true lottery. So, to end on a practical note, the true lottery approach:
- First 24-hour window: accept lottery entrants.
- Second 24-hour window: winners notified and can buy tickets.
- Repeat 1-2 with remaining tickets, setting aside any for winners that show up in the server logs but didn’t consummate the purchase so support can follow up.
Put a true “tickets remaining” live counter on the website. Make an official WWDC app so you can get push notifications of the windows, lottery wins, etc. Perhaps make the app a requirement for entry.