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..."

Comments

Try running it like a paintball shop

[KurdtX]

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.