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Starting a LAN Gaming Centre?
A not-s- Anonymous Coward asks: "I've been given the opportunity to pitch a group of investors to open a LAN gaming centre (or centres, depending on how things go). These centres will be opening in an area that has little to no high-speed net access (and will be unlikely to in the future), very cheap equipment and labour, and a good core of 300-400K potential customers (right age groups, well-developed gaming culture, and plenty of disposable income). Anyone have any experience running a gaming centre, or any ideas of potential gotchas? We have written up the proposals and plans including the standard things (PCs, networking equipment, servers, furniture, fixtures, techs, games, etc), but were wondering if the community has anything to contribute? Oh, and there are none of these centres where we are planning on opening them..."
If you try to have 100 PCs that people can use, you're going to run into a nightmare of dealing with the abuse, complaints (this 3 month old system isn't as fast as my home one that I got yesterday!) and cost. Instead, I'd say have some decent rigs available for rental for the newbie games who got dragged along with their friends, or for those who have crap boxes at home. And to keep the paintball analogy, charge for the network like they do paint. That means you can't bring your own (hubs, etc) - everyone pays per drop per hour (or whatever).
I'd also suggest you consider how you're going to do setup. If it's just one large room it's going to be really loud during peak hours, and rather evidently embarrasing when you only have 8 or so people there at a time. Other places put the players into small groups, and then assign them a room(s) to use. That way, you can make it look as busy as you'd like, since they would "fill" the room they're in.
One last suggestion, if it didn't seem obvious: whatever you're charging, include unlimited fountain drinks somehow. They'd be cheap, get people to play longer (more $$), and show off that you really do understand geeks. There was a pretty cool (Magic Edge in Mt. View) place that used to do virtual reality dogfights, but they charged bar prices for food & drinks, so I never stayed to eat/drink there. That would definitely be a problem for any place I would see myself spending more than 4 hours.
Kurdt
I'm not anti-social. Just pro-technology.
I'm not sure I follow you on what this "Gaming Center" does. Do you rent out space and everybody brings in their own computers, software and stuff or do you actually have the computers, games and infrastructure and you rent time playing said games?
If it's the former, other than normal marketing and liability/insurance issues, I don't really see any problems.
However, if you're renting time using the games, you might run into some legal issues. I seem to remember several Internet Cafe-type establishments being shut down because they were reselling game time. This might have been because they only had one copy, or there might have been some verbage in the EULA that prohibited renting, selling or otherwise publicly performing with the software. Be sure to get your lawyers to check this out.
Regardless of which way you're going, make sure you have comfortable, adjustable height chairs, geek-friendly lighting (no flourescent light fixtures shining right onto monitors), a snack bar with the usual staples (Junk & Jolt/Mt. Dew), abundant power (not the whole room running off of two breakers), and a good network infrastructure.
Personally, on the electrical and network side, I'd build the gaming stations with 8 seats, an 8-port, 100 megabit switch for each and at least a 15 amp breaker for every 4 stations. Each station should have a nice surge protector molded in where with a couple of extra outlets for the "wall wart" transformers common with speakers.
Sounds like an interesting idea, either way. I'd really like to know when and where it'll be opening.
There's so little difference between politics and jihad lately...
Ping Time has been running in madison wi for over a year. So it at least has moderate success. They spec out their machines prices and policies on their website. They also let players outside join on lan games they are playing so that friends without high speed access or the newest 50$ game du jour can play with their friends that do without hauling their machine around and pirating copies. I also know that they use a cloning product that rebuilds the machines automatically every night. It also lets them rebuild ones that go down quickly. I'm not sure what they do about hardware security. Every smart public lab has at least some kind of case locks and cable down components. I would also install something like VNC so I can see what is going on, on any machine and make sure that people aren't doing thing that are illegal from machines you are responsible for. They sell copies of all of the games they have available as well as gaming mice and keyboards and video cards. Not a large stock but it is the pro shop concept. They also do some console games. It's a nice pretty professionally organized place.