Search
Close this search box.
Main Menu

San Diego Comic-Con 2025 Returning Registration Recap: My Con Only Breaks Its Favorite Waiting Rooms

For better or worse, several thousand Comic-Con attendees have their badges for 2025 — and several thousand more don’t yet.

Returning Registration for San Diego Comic-Con 2025, the badge sale for eligible returning general attendees, took place today. This is our third year with this new system, which utilizes a QueueIt waiting room and Configio.

Last year’s sale was plagued by several issues and glitches, though last year’s Open Registration ran relatively smoothly.

So by comparison, how did Returning Registration for SDCC 2025 stack up?

The Waiting Room

The waiting room opened a few minutes early, at 7:52am PT, eight minutes ahead of schedule. 

This was relatively uneventful (especially compared to last year), with no issues with the waiting room that we saw during this period. The waiting room did get a refresh, though, which was nice to see (and more on that later).

Just like last year, anyone could technically enter the waiting room, as you aren’t prompted to login until you actually are selected to checkout after 9am. This doesn’t mean anyone could purchase — but if you wanted to waste your morning sitting in a waiting room, you certainly could.

Everyone waited patiently for 9am (even if they also had a lot of anxiety), when the great randomization would begin.

 

The Sale

Shortly after 9am, those in the waiting room were randomized. Just like last year, the randomization happens very quickly, in which everyone is randomly assigned a place in line. Once you were, you saw… a Toucan! Yes, the iconic “walking man” and green status bar was replaced by the Comic-Con International mascot: the Toucan. In hindsight, this may not have been the greatest decision, as people do not have warm and fuzzy feelings after they’ve been staring at that status bar for an hour, but it’s new and cute, and we appreciate the effort to make it more customized to San Diego Comic-Con.

This status bar gives you a rough estimation of how long until you’d be able to purchase badges — for some, only a minute or two away, and for others, more than an hour.

From here, all you could do was wait. Sales started almost immediately, with several reporting getting in within the first few minutes.

At first, things seemed to be going very smoothly, with users reporting getting through quickly.

Shortly before Preview Night sold out though is when things started to change. Everyone’s times started climbing back up, presumably as they could see there was too much stress on the system so they likely slowed down entry.

Shortly after this, Preview Night sold out at 35 minutes into the sale — only a little longer than the 29 minutes it took in 2023’s Returning Registration.

But the slow down seemed to be too little, too late, as shortly after, those who had made it past the waiting room and into the check-out process reported error screens, timeouts, and major slowdowns.

On my own end, I experienced:

  • The system saying eligible members could not be found, even though I am positive the Member ID and last name were correct. When trying another window/login, they did work.
  • The system going so slow that the payment wouldn’t process and had to be tried again
  • When the payment did process, rather than being taken to the Congratulations page, being taken back to the queue. The tickets did go through, but we only knew this by emails going out.

For anyone who experienced an error, the best thing you can do is to contact Comic-Con International.

Things did eventually right themselves, and times started to drop back down. Saturday badges were the next to sell out, at 75 minutes into the sale, more than last year’s 66 minutes.

Friday was next, at 81 minutes into the sale, more than last year’s 73 minutes.

Traditionally, Thursday and Sunday sell out at roughly the same time, but there was more of a spread across the two dates this year. Thursday badges sold out at 94 minutes into the sale, a bit higher than last year’s 89 minutes.

And Sunday badges followed at 100 minutes into the sale, also higher than last year’s 89.

 

 

Overview & Next Steps

For whatever reason, Returning Registration always seems to be plagued by more issues and glitches than Open Registration. Many of the errors from this year happened last year as well — though to a seemingly larger degree.

The good news is that according to our very un-scientific poll, it seems that the vast majority of our readers walked away from the sale with a badge — with 80% reporting as of press time that they were able to secure at least a single day badge.

That’s about on par with last year. What’s not great is that 8% report they didn’t get badges due to a glitch/error, which is a bit higher than last year. Again, if you were someone who was affected by an issue during today’s sale, we highly recommend you reach out to Comic-Con International here.

All hope is not lost, if you weren’t able to get exactly what you wanted today. Open Registration — the badge sale available to anyone with a Member ID — will take place on Saturday, October 26. During this sale, all badge types will be available (so just because a badge sold out today, doesn’t mean it’s gone forever). So long as you didn’t purchase all four days plus Preview Night today, you’ll be able to participate to pick up any days you weren’t able to get today.

Badges will be mailed to the U.S. addresses in your Member ID. Make sure you verify your address.

As for all other badge types? General hotel sales should be sometime after Open Registration (likely in April), and all other badge registration events (volunteer registration for those on the interest list, Trade Professionals, and more) will be at a later date.

Were you able to get what you wanted today? Let us know in the comments.

Tags

Related Posts

Share this post

Subscribe to our newsletter

Get the biggest SDCC news delivered straight to your inbox.
Scroll to Top