Slashdot Mirror
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..."
in places as 'backwoods' as Martinsburg, WV that were nothing more than regular computer video games with "VR Goggles" attached to the video output. The one here seems to be doing OK business, but apparently mostly among the 8-13 year old kids whose parents won't buy them high-end gaming systems. They spend what would have been their regular arcade money in this eight-unit place now, which is fine because the arcade has pretty much the same games it had five years ago and will probably continue to do so.
I think with the interesting people, their lives can't possibly be wrapped up into a nice little package.
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.
You've got 300,000 to 400,000 potential customers, but no chance of high speed networking in the near future? What bizarro world is this?
Consider that computer gamers are a small subset of the computer using public. No idea of the percentages, so I'll say %50. So double that number you quoted, fudge it a little bit...
You have a million potential customers for high speed networking? Drop the gaming crap, and run, run as fast as you can to set up an independent DSL provider. Get in there fast, before the ILEC beats you to it.
Or how about just opening a plain-jane cybercafe? If there are this many people wanting net access (again, I doubt it. Go back and double-check your analysis thus far) you can setup a cybercafe with your choice of T-1 or private satellite connection.
Ignore the comments about free drinks. That's completely idiotic. Bowling alleys give away the games (almost) in an attempt to sell sodas and nachos. I would also be careful of food in/around the games. Personally, I would outfit the place with USB equipment. With the 6-10 foot range, you can keep the computers locked up, or at least away from cokes and chips (and cigarettes. When you aren't looking, someone will light up). And when someone dumps a coke on the keyboard, with USB, you can replace it without a hitch. Or even a reboot.
What about software? Are you going to make sure someone shows up with legit copies? Or are you going to rent copies? Call out the attorneys in either case.
Someone talked about quality of gaming rigs. There's a few ways to handle this. First, I would check with Alienware and similar companies, and see if you can get reasonable lease terms. Try to get into a situation where you are replacing the top of the line machines every six months (shortly after the latest and greatest video cards come out?) Older machines can then be either sold for reduced rates, or donated for a tax write off. Sooner or later, you will have new machines and old ones. Charge more for the more expensive machines.
They do at Kinko's. Speaking of Kinko's, a self service payment system would be something I would like.
Reservations? I'd charge a fee. Require a deposit of 30 minutes time. If they show, it is applied to the cost of the session. If not, you keep the money. This also gets you credit cards, which you'll surely want for someone who might hose the machine.
Again, I'd like to say that if there are that many potential customers, there are more lucrative things to do. But if it works, let us know.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Actually, if they just skip the plywood and let the cube walls do their job, it will cut down on sound a lot. Problem is you want sight lines to make it look "cool," while at the same time hiding how crowded/not it is.
All the places I have seen in SE Asia have been loud and obnoxious for "adults," but I guess the "kids" like it.
Main trick would be high ceilings with acoustic tile ceilings, block line-of sight to the speakers with interior partitions, with some kind of background music and white noise. There isn't much low frequency rumble to make it too rough on whomever would use the place.
I hope you include how you are going to make money, and how long it will take to become profitable. This may sound obvious, but many geeks spend lots of time planning hardware and software, but forget the business plan. If you are new to this, I recommend that you spend the money to hire someone to review it, and/or get some good books on the subject. The more you know ahead of time (plans, failsafes, even what criteria you will use to decide when to give up) will improve your chances in may ways.
The Stomping Grounds is one. Perhaps they can offer some advice, if you aren't directly competing with them.
Back in the day, (1997, such a heady time) I setup and ran a small cyber-cafe and game room. My observations and suggestions: :-) We had the entire Office suite on the two machines with access to the scanner. All the machines were able to print to the Epsons and we charged a minimal charge per page printed to cover ink on those thirsty ink jets. :-)
1) We had a our pcs locked up in another room away from the game room. In the cafe area they were behind a partition with a small locked walkway to provide access and airflow, big enough to get in and switch the system out or at least pop a ghost boot floppy in and hit reset. The game PC's were in a locked area with a 100mb switched network between the 8 boxes and the dedicated server for glQuake. there were holes in the walls big enough for the various KVM/Sound cables. We also had Thunderseats setup in the individual booths, each hooked to an individual 100 watt amp.
2) Black light in the Game room is cool. Throws enough light to see, and gives a nice ambeiance for multiplayer games.
3) Offer other services. We had a nice fast SCSI auto feeding scanner and nice (for the time) Epson color ink jet printers out front in the net cafe area. These got a pretty fair amount of use from our walk-in traffic..i.e. Older people who did not have a computer but heard through the grapevine that we could help them scan a picture and help them send it to a loved one.
3) Good control software makes the hourly charges easy. I had a good friend who we contracted with to write a client server package to control access to all the pcs in the building. We replaced Explorer with our custom shell that only allowed access to certain programs (IE, Solitare, Freecell on the Internet machines. Quake, Outlaws, Nascar Racing on the game machines) It had a little intigrated timer that ran in the program and it would dump you out of the game/program when whatever time you purchaced ran out and come up with a little login prompt that started the timer and shell program. Also in the program was a button to add one or more hours to your current session so that you would not have to come running back to the register to request more time. This software also ran our POS and inventory system. It was fairly robust for being written over the course of two weeks.
4) Choose your staff wisely. You need at least one person with a solid hardware/software background on hand at all times to minimize downtime and keep the customers happy. Also someone who can be cannon fodder when you have only one or two people wanting to play doesn't hurt either. You also want to make sure your folks are not farking off in CS during the time they should be mopping the floor.
5) Tournaments Tournaments Tournaments. Our biggest day was a 14-18 year old only double elimination Quake tournament. We had lots of nice prizes and had a big party afterwards with food and dj. This was our 2nd tournament it went off without a hitch.
Now for the bad news. You are going to fight with broadband sooner or later. You will loose unless you have enough bandwidth of your own. Along these lines, if you can get enough capital, you might want to look at rolling your own DSL service for some folks. If you can sell the dsl service you can buy a bigger pipe for the cafe and the dsl customers.
Also think about leasing your hardware. New pcs every three years is a good thing, especially for gaming systems as 3 years is about the life of todays state of the art. Your not going to be able to compete with the childgeek with a new box in a year and a half, but your selling the environment for multiplayer gaming, rather than the machines the games run on, so having the absolute latest and greatest is not totally required. If latest and greatest is require, roll the upgrades around the place, i.e. this year and a halfs game machine is the last year and a halfs internet access box. Only thing this requires is a couple of intenet access boxes that your consider disposable, which in this day of less than $700 pca, is pretty freakin easy.
Well thats all I can think of for now. Hope I've provided a little info you can use. And I hope you have a better backer than we did, he bankrupted the computer store he owned and took the cafe with it, even though we only had two months where we did not turn a profit in the eight months we were open.