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Can a Gaming Cafe be Successful?
droidlev asks: "For years I've been toying around with the idea of opening up a medium sized gaming cafe in the Chicago suburbs. I have already taken care of the issue on how to make money during the day, when our younger market is in school, However, the question of whether or not a place like this can be successful, still remains. I've seen plenty of undermanned and poorly planned places in the area (and on the East Coast) like this go under in six months. What is your opinion? What ideas and thoughts do you have that could help a place, like the one I'm proposing, succeed? Do you have gaming cafes in your area that are successful? What unique techniques have they implemented?"
Springfield Mall in Fairfax County (not far from the Franconia/Springfield Metro Station), Virginia has a cyber cafe which also offers gaming on PCs and game consoles and its doing really well. They also have WiFi for people who bring in their own laptops. I'd say go for it!
Michael "TheZorch" Haney
thezorch@gmail.com
http://thezorch.googlepages.com/home
Personally, I've seen some neat places, but none of them seem to survive any more than a couple years. Good luck, I don't know what you'd have to do to be profitable.
I'm not anti-social, I'm anti-idiot.
I know of a pretty sizable place on the north side, by Old Orchard thats been around for a few years, they seem to keep pretty busy. I was in there not too long ago and World of Warcraft seemed to be a popular choice, its a social game so it works well I guess.
No smoking sigs indoors.
I know that the Dining and Gaming combined nicely and has several locations. I've done some light research on this topic and what you'll need is a way to be able to get rid of most of the stuff if it doesn't work out. Leasing equipment untill your making enough profit to satisfy your tastes. http://www.daveandbusters.com/
We have a place locally in the Cambridge, Ontario, Canada area that works well. I think the key is to keep the gamers happy. One great idea the plllace has is a membership system, which I think encourages people to keep coming back. Good luck! http://www.thefragshop.com/
These are the good old days you'll be telling your children about. Make them worthwhile.
I live in Brisbane, Australia, and gaming cafe's are quite popular in the major cities. I know of at least four around inner city brisbane that have been open for years and are quite successful. From my observations their main revenue intake is based around these key concepts: 1. Location 2. Word of mouth Location is imperical, and you need to strike deals/lan nights to get word of mouth generation. Setting up shop near a school (preferably private school) can sometimes make this type of business a success, as i've seen in Brisbane. If you start all nighters and events it will generate a decent amount of friends telling other friends and so on to bring in business and customers. Anyway, these are just a few suggestions i'm guessing you already know about, hope it helps. PS: If you have the room, get a pool table!
Just make sure you lock the computers. Literally lock them and make sure that the 5 1/4 slots can't be easily pulled out. I have a friend who used to steal ram from the lan cafes/PC gaming places.
Buy one for pennies on the dollar after it goes under. That seemed to work here.
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
"Do you have gaming cafes in your area that are successful? What unique techniques have they implemented?""
Were's Flynn when you need him?
this was my final management project in college. only about seven years ago. the idea was also to incorporate private rooms for work or for conferences etc. safe to say that i still don't have the money for it.
www.qsopht.com ~q
You didn't specify what kind of games your cafe would feature. I assume you mean computer games (WoW, CS:S, et al). There is a place in my area that does very well in that market, but only because of variety.
I'd recommend offering something aside from computer games. Set up some tables for Magic: The Gathering, D&D, Battletech, Warhammer, etc so you aren't only catering to the "I don't have broadband" market. This way you'll become a social gathering place for geeks. You may even consider starting a card/miniature trading deal in your shop where you buy things from your customers and sell them back.
That's my advice. But, then again, I have NO business sense.
Anyone else think the comments just weren't rendering right before they turned off ABP and saw ads?
I don't see what the point is. PC's are dirt cheap. Internet connections are slowly getting cheaper. Hell, the game I play almost 24/7 (see sig) requires only a browser. I can play it on a Pentium 1 with dial up just fine. What are you offering that the average personal doesn't already have?
The key to anything is adding value to a commodity. PCs are a crappy commodity even with mods.
Why should I use your facility rather than a crappy one. Are you going to have hot chicks offering massage? How about a place to smoke while you play? Good DJs beat matching to the action? Red velvet? What?
Take it from me nothing is worse than just another fucking cubicle.
yes they can be succesfull. You have to be business minded though. You wont make much money just allowing people to play games. I mean you could get a group to come have pre set up LAN parties. However affordable game playing is hard to imagine. But sell the crap they need/want ie caffine sugar light fare (hot dogs pre made sandwichs) you could really start to turn a profit in my opinion. Put some lower powerd PCs near the front in a lighted area for web access/email checking. Place the business in an area with decent traffic mall near a mall or movie theater. there is one i have been to a few times in the Dallas area called shadowlan. I think they almost have it down, but no food. You got to feed people if you want them to pay you instead of dragging PCs to a LAN party somewhere else.
I think that the best way to attract and retain customers would be to host some LAN parties for some of the popular games. You could also offer the place to rent for private parties as well.
Anyone who can afford your services is too busy making money to actually go to your shop. Your only chance is to appeal to people who have lots of money and lots of time. IE: Near a very expensive university.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Good luck, but currently, I don't think it's a viable business plan.
In Schaumburg, Zactec on, I think it's on Schaumburg road has been going strong for years. I've never been in there, but I'm told it's smokey and people steal mouse balls.
It can work, but you're going to, as you said, need incentive for non-gamers to go, as well as kids who may already do as much gaming as they need with a big screen TV, 3 friends and XBox Live.
Smoke! Smoke! Are you smokin' yet? Obligatory Family Guy reference. Anyway, it's possible. I don't have the money to go. That's another issue in itself. Us gamers are lazy slobs... Do you really expect us to pay?
I had entertained that idea myself for a while but after going to ones outside my immediate area but within driving distance one thing I observed was that while they all mostly started out great with good staff, top of the line machines, local advertising, a pleasant atmosphere and a good selection of games, within a year or so most are pits with low staffing, unkept facilities, outdated machines and poor selection of games. I dont know if their budgets run out, or if they just found that the majority didnt care about the latest and greatest so it wasnt worth the investment. One theory is that those that are hardcore games already have systems as good or better at home
I did find a few things I would do differently, for one I would like to see a bank of printers, scanners, etc so that during certain hours (maybe school hours and few after that, the machines could actually be used for study, business etc. I also thought of adding a gamestop type game exchange with maybe a points program for time rented and maybe tournaments and contests (monthly high score, etc). Another idea would be to have certain nights that are 18+ and special events on a monthly basis. For rental time I wanted to use a keycard system like gemstar to keep track of time and charges. I had also thought about working out an advertising/sales deal with a local vendor to help with equipment costs.
I wrote an entire business plan but then got a job offer I couldnt pass up and just kind of threw it aside for now. I belive "cyber cafe's" are viable here but they need more of a hook than just "PC's for rent".
and the more successfull ones were built around other businesses as an additional attraction. a local pizza/sub shope would have a game room where i could throw away a roll of quarters from the paper route income. the laundry houses also had a few video game machines. i don't recall standalone game rooms (the malls had 'um but i never frequented these places) that were successfull.
today, places are starting to incorporate wifi access as part of their extended business plan. most panera bread stores have free wifi access. so, i go to panera bread for coffee. i hear the starbucks has wifi, but you have to be part of some expensive plan to use them. i've never gone that route.
so, to answer your quetsions, no, there are no gaming houses that are successfull around here, and more creative business establishments would use something like that as an attraction to compliment their other business.
fat single 35 year old's living in their parents basement..
...shoot..
wait...they'd be able to afford their own computer and internet connection..
A very successful one around me - which was open for years, but has recently closed (I think mostly due to new developments in the area) - incorporated a slightly esoteric menu (vegan items and so forth) with a coffee bar and gaming den.
SYS 64738
I have seen a number of gaming cafes around the states and would suggest that a signifcant overhaul to the business model is needed to establish a viable business in this area. Dont mistake this as a negative approach, but rather an opportunity to enter this space as a differentiator. I would give these conventional gaming cafes 6mos-1year to survive. Some I have seen here in Houston, TX make me wonder why they are still around as they look like fronts for "other" illegal activity. Again, an opportunity to refine the concept and move forward.
ummm... this was for the ms access thread right? also on the front page? good info though.
You would be competing with PCs in the home (both the PC part and the home part). So you would need to offer services and features that kids can't get at home. Thinking up a list of such things is going to take more effort than I'm willing to put into a slashdot post.
But, let me give you an example from a different culture and a tangentially related service.
In Korea, at least in South Korea, kids live at home until marriage. That makes it really difficult for kids and even young adults to get any nookie time away from the stern and extremely conservative eye of the previous generation.
Consequently, afternoon and evening rentals of small "party rooms" have become fairly popular. They call them "bangs" there, as in "karaoke-bang" or "dvd-bang." They are rooms in restraunts or clubs which you rent out for a group to do things like karaoke, dvd watching, or eat a nice meal plus whatever else you feel like - with no worry that your parents are watching your every move, be it clumsy or suave.
I'm not suggesting you get set up to rent out "gaming-bangs" (although I'm not suggesting otherwise either) - I'm just using them as an example of how human nature wants what it wants and it will find a way. If you can figure out what people want from group gaming or what they want from something that can be easily related to gaming, and that they can't easily get elsewhere, then you have a shot at success.
If you don't have something that people can't get at home, it's not worth the trouble.
We had one place that was successful in my area quite a few years back because they could provide a large amount of internet bandwidth for a relatively low cost compared to consumer prices. However, when DSL and eventually cable modem caught on, that market was done.
If this is strictly a gaming cafe, in the age of oodles of bandwidth everywhere, if you cannot support numerous tournaments with worthwhile prizes (that people will potentially play all day or two straight days to get), it won't work.
As other posters suggested, if you combine food/coffee with the gaming, you may be onto something. But a gaming-only cafe, I think that idea was done 6-8 years ago and then it was done. When corporate-level bandwidth started to be available in homes at commodity prices, that was the end of that. You can now play in numerous online tourneys and still get very good prizes and whatnot...and from my perspective that's what a good portion of the people will go to a cafe and play for. When I played, I played for cash or prizes worth over $300 USD. That was the only way I could justify paying to get into a place and then wasting a day or two with the possibility I might get eliminated before I got the chance to earn a top 3 spot (which were the only payouts in a cafe tourney).
Aside from what I just said, if you live in a major metro area, it might work. I would imagine Chicago would be a decent place to try this because of all the bandwidth there and managed hosting of all kinds. I know Hurricane Electric will rent out completely furnished computer labs and such expressly designed for gaming. You pay a deposit to the provider, charge the people to come in and play, etc etc. If you plan it right, you can make money.
Well, I don't have any. But some close friends of mine just opened a gaming cafe in a town small enough not to have one yet. They put the cash in and got decent hardware while spending minimal amounts on the decor, just enough to clean it up. Against my advice they franchised some software to manage it but the franchisor gave them a lot of help along the way. In this case the fees were paid off within the first three months but the quality of the setup was sometimes suspect (VMware virtual machine on linux running Windows NT running TurboSquidNT as the gateway. WTF?). I don't see how you couldn't do all the work yourself just a easily however. The hours are long! It's hard, monotonous work and you don't get a lot of time to focus on your own gaming, but the cash is coming in and they're making a lot of money. They're focusing on return customers and keeping them happy, doing things like all-night lock-ins to keep it interesting. As for around here, there are dozens, literally dozens of crap quality net cafes in the area, but they're always full, mostly of the local asian population. The moral: study the area you're opening. Are the cafes full? When are they full? What's the rent like? Is the area safe to hang out in? Is the cafe presentable? Work your ass off and it'll all work out just fine.
I'm guessing you were aiming for the Microsoft Access article, close but no cigar
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go back, take a left at the coffee shop and there you have it: http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/12/0
post it on slashdot. that should give it a lot of traffic if it's in a major city. My honest opinion is that most people don't need to go to a gaming cafe, they have their own machines. you should make it a normal cafe, with some decent gaming rigs as a side. maybe even putting it in a college town where there is not much else to do. try and make it the hangout place for all the geeks that just got off work/class
I have seen many gaming cafes spring up and then disappear within typically two years in the Seattle area. I also personally know of one guy that owned a shopping mall in southern Washington and gave a gaming cafe a try in one of the empty mall spaces. He hired a very knowledgable admin to run the place and it still didn't make money despite the fact that the shop didn't have to pay rent for the space. He closed shop and then had 25-30 computers sitting in his garage collecting dust. Not knowing what to do with them, he hired me to set up a gaming LAN at his house for when his friends and family come over. While setting up the computers, I found the admin's resume on one of the hard drives. Seems he was looking for a real job while the cafe went in the tank. I think I'd avoid starting a gaming cafe like the plague....I've never seen one survive.
There used to be a gaming cafe near my home. They closed a few months ago and were replaced by a barbershop. I say don't risk it.
Well, I run one along with two other guys. The place will eventually make money but its not exactly a cash cow here (although it may get better after some of our competition goes under).
A lot of people chimed in mentioning that computers and net access are cheap. Well, that's true. I would also mention that, at a hypothetical $5.00 / hour (we're cheaper due to being in small town USA), it takes quite a while to catch up with a computer, games, maintenance, and internet access.
For people who either just browse the net or people who play games maybe five or six hours per week, it's much less trouble and cost effective to go to a place like this. I dare say that most people fall into that more casual group--especially when you consider they also divide their time with home consoles. We also have a nightly and weekly open-pass rate that keeps the place hopping when we would otherwise be slow.
There are other mitigating factors too. Maybe they don't trust their roommates. Maybe they're traveling. Maybe they really just want to avoid their parents. Maybe they skateboard in the area and just want to buy a drink someplace cool. All of these people fill in the gaps that are left by hardcore gamers just buying their own computer.
Some advice, don't go it alone. We have three people that own / work the place (only open after 5pm) and we couldn't really do it with less (and bona fide employees are expensive). Also, plan to replace your computers. If you don't you'll run out of money just when the business is taking off. Also, don't forget the three most important things to a business: location, location, and location. Finally, keep in mind that some games aren't licensed for cafe usage without special arrangements. Most notable is Valve Software (for which we have a cafe license). Also, don't pirate Windows. It's just stupid (and *will* get you shut down when the competition kindly turns you in).
I think Mauve has the most RAM. --PHB (Dilbert Comic)
I know you're envisioning a non-stop LAN party like you have with your friends, but (at least in the USA) it's probably not going to go down like that.
You're probably going to need to cater to teens. Teens are less likely to have their own computers, or their usage is restricted by their parents. They're also a lot more social-- they want to get out of the house and they have time to kill. Conversely adults are more likely to be able to afford their own gaming rigs, and (more importantly) they tend to want to be left alone-- they'd rather play in the comfort of home than hanging around a gaming cafe-- especially if it's filled with packs of teenagers (kind of a catch 22...)
The downside, of course, is that you'll be spending a lot of time playing babysitter. You'll be constantly monitoring for theft and vandalism, telling them not to smoke in front, maybe even breaking up a fight or two. You're going to get a lot of attitude. Did I mention the theft and vandalism? Things are going to go missing and you're going to have no idea how they pulled it off. Things are going to be broken for no reason at all. Ever seen an arcade machine in pristine condition? For that matter, ever seen an arcade bathroom? That's what yours will look like every night too...
You are not the only one. I have thought this for the Chicago northern burbs for many years, starting around 1995. Never did it pan out, and as much fun as it seems, it just wasn't a feasable business plan. Though there are some around the area, they attract the wrong crowds, creating trouble. I know of some already in pretty much all the large burbs already as well.
I recommend console games in addition to PC games. I long for the past days of four-player free-for-all GoldenEye 64.
We've had a couple here that have been around for about 5+ years. They both offer PC gaming as well as consoles. Another aspect to both is that they offer food/drink. One actually offers cuban sandwiches (the family who opened it is Cuban). The other has more of a coffee-shop thing going on. I think the ultimate would be if you would combine it with a bar. Esepcially if you're near a college campus.
The parent is asking what I was thinking, though I think most people are looking for more of a game then a Pentium I over dialup can provide. What are you going to offer that most people don't have, seeing as most have fairly fast computers with broad band connections? I have seem gaming cafes that have been open for a couple years at vacation areas. Kids want to play at these locations, but parents are not willing to invest in high speed internet at a vacation house. Maybe even offer the kids a "plug" for their laptops, as most places I have seen require using the "business" computers.
I know a guy that has a successul gaming business. He offers a laundry feature. So people can clean their clothes while they purchase \ play games. This is a great idea considering alot of gamers need to clean their clothes anyways. btw I'm an evil genius.
I had two friends out of college try it and they had to shut down after a year or so. They were smart CompSci grads, wrote a lot of their own software to run the place keeping costs down, but in the end it just wasn't profitable.
You said several of these places existed in your area, but shut down. Why didn't you go? and if they were poorly run, maybe it was because they weren't bringing in enough money to hire enough qualified help to make the business model viable.
Location is probably one of the most important factors
when starting a business like this,
We had one start up in my town about a year ago, they had good ideas,
Not only computer gaming, but also xbox's, ps2's, older console games,
board games, d&d/MTG tables, and they actually sold food.
But they went under in less than 6 months, why you ask?
Location. They were on the corner of 2 very busy streets, in a bad area.
Also, their parking lot was across said very busy streets, so not only did
you need to worry about being in said bad area, you also needed to worry
about getting ran over while walking to your car.
These may or may not be useful, but anyway...
Have two sections, one for gamers and one for people who just want to surf the internet.
Have a few consoles and screens linked together for tournaments, when it would be hard for the players to gather the necessary cables and screens to one house.
Get the newest and most anticipated games right away. Sell them for a small loss (depending on regulations, but I was thinking of console games) when fewer people are interested.
Sell food and pop. Maybe set up the equipment so that food can be eaten at the computers.
The people going are probably going for the social setting, not the games. Put speakers on stands towards the player so that he can talk to others and hear, rather than using headphones, but still can be heard over the noise.
Have regular tournaments for prizes (such as 100 free hours or such) as publicity.
I have freaks! I did something right...
There have been a few in the Kansas City area where I live, one is still fairly successfull, the other was doing well but was shut down due to the owner getting ill.
There were also a few that failed. There were some things I noticed about what made the successfull ones successfull, and the unsuccessfull ones fail. The biggest thing was that the ones that were around for a while didn't focus just on PC games. Both of them offered (for free) space for running table top games, sold CCGs, table top books and accessories, sold PC hardware, rented time on machines to play PC games, and had a couple of TVs set up for console gaming (also for free).
They didn't focus on selling stuff as much as they focused on a place for gamers to hang out, and just happened to sell anything that one might need for gaming. Part of that was also keeping the stores fairly kid friendly. This meant keeping the older gamers from cursing loudly, as well as turning down the gore factor on games with such options. This made parents feel better about letting their kids hang out there, and the kids usually spent a good amount of money.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
at a game center that's almost on it's 4th year. I'll tell you straight up game center's barely break even. the only way we remain in the black is by doing stuff in the back.(pc repair, data processing)
If you plan on having Coin-operated type games, (even using a card reading system) you will be meeting a "Rep" from a certain "trade Association", In small town USA its no problem, but in the Chicago area those folks still have a presence. Oh, and if you plan on playing any kind of music for your customers, you will be meeting a "Rep" from another "Trade Asscociation," (this Association will Legally extort you). Both will demand $$, and you may want to bake that into your budget. Good Luck
I had a roommate who worked at an Internet café for a year or so, one of the only long lasting ones in Toronto. While it was among the best, it certainly wasn't a cash cow by any means.
This has led me to believe that some of the smaller, out of the way 'net cafés that never seem to go under are in another business altogether: money laundering. It seems to be an ideal situation, all revenues are based on rental which is impossible to quantify at the end of the month. It's also a relatively obscure business model as far as police are concerned... even among us /.ers few can fathom what kind of market there really is in the business.
Then again, I could be wrong. Just one possible explanation!
I'm from chicago and I know 4 different owners and two of them I supplied them the computers. 3 of the 4 went out of business in under 2 years. Not to be a pessimist but you really need to know what your doing. It's a big investment. It's not a matter a buying a bunch of cheap gaming systems a fractional t1 and think flocks of teens are going to come. The major cost is supporting those PC's especially if you allow your patrons to smoke like most cyber pc's. You have crazy sofware costs involved, but the biggest problem is unlike the past but today 90% of people have access to broad band internet and they want to use there computer since most likely it will be better then the cyber cafe. I know of at least 15 cyber cafe's in the chicagoland area ranging from 5 PC's to 60+ and half or 3/4 are korean owned and of those half have gone out of business. It's a very tough market. You need to market to schools run tournements get sponsorship and try to atract a few pro gamers. Most pro gamers are not going to be caught dead at a cyber cafe, why would they use inferior machines that aren't customized to there needs and why would they bother with the noise and distractions. Another problem with many cyber cafes that I've seen is you lose alot of females and older like 40+ crowd because cyber cafes are so overwhelmed with teenagers playing counter strike at the highest volume possible and being very obnoxious. I actually visited korea last year and I can't believe how much money they make especially for what they charge. You can play for .50 to a dollar and hour on a full T1 sometimes a T3 and the cafes are so nice and they bring you food and everything. These cafes are packed and run 24 hours. Hope this helps and good luck you'll most likely need it.
A good article from Slate about a guy and his failed coffeeshop business. Not quite the same, I realize, but still very insightful.
We can't tell you if it will do wlel in your area or not. You need to go around the local area and ask people, get their thoughts and opinions. Remember you have to offer something extra and make it worth everyones time being there if they do think it's a good idea. The following things I'd say would help.
Make a GOOD cup of coffee and tea. Charge reasonable prices and make it so people want to come to you for coffee over places like Starbucks. Once they're in the door impulse buying will take over more often than not.
Good food goes great with good coffee. Take a lesson from Arthur Dent and learn to make a good sandwich. They're easy to eat, rather cheap to make and they arn't too messy. Just what you need while playing.
Don't have uber loud music. Every place I see like this has loud techno music playing.. Just don't do it. Think of it more as a coffee bar than a gaming joint. If you make it a peaceful place it'll attract all ages, if you make it a noisey place only kids will come.
Chairs : Good chairs = less pain = will sit there longer = will pay more money
Set up some good custom loyality schemes as well. Give them a card and say like for every 5 hours they get half an hour free or offer a 10% discount or whatever. It gives people a reason to stay a bit longer and buy more stuff/time.
Last and by no means least. Set up a good community, make sure the place has a good vibe to it and people will call others there just to hang out. Don't shun them, welcome them even if they're only there to sit and have a drink.
I like muppets.
The only gaming cafe I've ever seen stay open for more then two years in Chicago is at Old Orchard Mall . I believe that is in Evanston. You may want to think of: 1. who are your customers? 2. what do they want? 3. where are they? 4. how do they get to you? 1. Your customers are generally (without doing a external survey) 12 - 26 y.o. males with extra income. 2. They want to go "out" ( as in out of the house) to some place local and either play mmporg games or shoot em ups. 3. relatively rich neighborhoods Naperville, schaumburg, Kennelworth, Wheeling , Wilmette, Oak Park 4. being in a mall with buss transportation or even better Metra/"L" seems to be a mainstay for kids who will plunk their allowance into your pocket. Also, Most of the gaming cafes that I've seen (only 3) have been relatively dark with reflective windows. So that customers inside can be as dorky as they want in private. The machines that I seen at the gaming cafe are no joke at least $2000. err a "friend of mine" has gone to one because the video card was bad ass and the connection rocks. He had a big WoW raid and I wanted to turn the resolution up and not be lagged to death. It was far beyond what he could afford at the time.
There was a gaming cafe up in Concord, NH. It died a slow, horrible death. So I'm going to say no, not unless gaming computers grow in price to thousands of thousands of dollars, or the food at the cafe is Michelin rated and free.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
I like to think of the real problem game centers have in terms of system dynamics: a game center draws customers from within a limited geographic radius (about 10 miles, or maybe 15 km, in my case). Within that radius there are a limited number of people who will be interested in what you offer. In the early days business grows exponentially, but NOT because of any kind of growth in the number of potential customers--it's just that more and more of your fixed number of potential customers are finding out about you. At some point you reach saturation, and that where the system dynamics comes into play: you are in a fight between the number of potential customers in your area that are leaving (graduated, moved away, bought their own computer, ran out of money, lost interest, etc.) versus the number of new potential customers that are being created (moved in, got old enough mom would let them play, etc.). Basically, there are many more paths for customers to leave then there are for them to arrive in your pool of "potentials", so it's a loosing proposition.
Yes, there are things you can do to change the coefficients of some of the terms in the basic equation: you can try to bring in more adults, you can add more games more frequently, do more advertising, etc. What I've seen, though--and I've validated the basic model with several other (former) game center owners--is that if you do everything right business is good for about a year and a half, then it peaks and falls off to much lower level. Revenues can remain stable after that point, but at a level that is WAY below the peak--and that generally means you don't have the profits you need to upgrade machines, buy new games, etc. When you stop being able to upgrade and add new games, you enter the final part of the curve when business falls off further from the already-low plateau it was at, and then you're dead (in terms of the business).
Tweak the situation a little bit and the timing of when you hit the inflection points on the curve will shift forward or backward some, but the basic shape of the curve doesn't change--that's why I say that this really isn't a viable business.
Oh, those "special circumstances" I mentioned, that would make it viable? They DO exist, but are rare: for example, you don't pay for most or even any of your games (a popular strategy in developing countries, and unfortunately used much more frequently than you might think even in the developed world!); you're setting up business in a community where there's nothing else for kids to do; you find other uses for the floorspace and computers that you can make money on when people aren't playing games (computer classes, for example). Even if these or similar factors apply in your case, though, they usually only make the difference between surviving and not--I've never seen a case where they are enough to actually get things to the point where the business is financially attractive to be in.
Yes, all of the
They're a consumable, especially if you intend to sell the place for gaming. You'll have to keep them fairly up to date, otherwise there'll be no point. The question is whether or not you can bring enough revenue in to support that, which I doubt is possible in North America.
In Hampton Roads Virginia (Southeast Virginia), there is a cyber cafe that has been in business for years. I'm not sure how long but at least 5-10 years. I would imagine the most expensive part of Cyber Cafe startup is the Tier line and being able to pay for it on monthly basis.
Check out Website CyberCafe. They have webcams and photos of the place to see how they got it setup. Webcams are live so you can also see how busy it is with a 1.6 million population.
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Hookers, and Blackjack...
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
I recommend looking into software called 'Smart Launch' for managing the client computers. This includes accounts, profiles, access to content, time/money on each account, rates, etc.
A number of cybercafe's and LAN centers that I have been to use SmartLaunch, and all have had some success with it.
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Paluminum.net
I posted earlier why it's tough to open one, but some suggestions that will help you are the following: 1. Have a payment system where patrons prepay not pay after like there done in many korean cyber cafe. 2. If your going to be selling cooked food make sure you get a food establishment license or else the Chicago Department of Revenue or Department of Public Health can and will come after you. 3. Limit the noise, get high quality headphones 4. Offer patrons to bring there own PC's and charge them internet connection only something reasonable like $1 an hour. Your selling your T1 and the social experience to these customers 5. Offer tournaments lock in style. Offer tournements where customer prepays and plays over night for a reasonable fee. Offer prizes from sponsors or money. 6. Don't ignore senior citizens and females. Senior citizens may be your bread and butter during the day and non school hours, don't ignore females since they represent half the population. To get both enforce conduct code limit smoking to smoking section only, and limit profanity and shouting. 7. Offer hardware/training classes during the day or early mornings. 8. Run a secondary business like PC repair, PC sales, webhost and webdesign etc... 9. Target schools and other organizations, give them a discount 10. Get good chairs like previous posts. 11. Maintain PC's all time. Any minute a PC is down is losing you money. 12. Offer wifi service, at an extreme discount like .50 an hour or free with purchase of food or prepay internet card.
13. Market, Market, Market, so many cyber cafe's fail because they cater to only certain people and they expect people to be able to find them. Build a website, run ads and coupons, create a referrel program get as many people don't be content.
14. Make sure you have the capital to sustain your operation. I've seen so many cyber cafes that last only 6 months because there undercapitalized.
15. Realize your running a business so go easy on those comps to your friends and family or so called friends.
That's just a few that came to the top of my head, I have more. If you need help with web site and online marketing you can email me at alink@estoreware.com my company specializes in that we're based in chicago. Good Luck!!!
There are 3 here in Austin, TX and they're good. I mainly go to one though...
Things that they do/have that impress me
1) Internet access, not just games
2) Wide variety of games (not just FPS, MMO's, RPG's, and strategy too)
3) Consoles and Retro games
4) Tech Support/Computer Repair
5) Events (both gaming (they had World Cyber Games stuff) and game dev (3D User Group, IGDA Chapter, IGDA Indie SIG (my group) )
6) Sponsor outside events
7) Pretty cheap + offer discounts - hourly rates + day passes.
I would say the number one issue is that laptops generally suck for gaming, so you need to provide computers or consoles for people at a reasonable price. Although some people have laptops that can handle gaming, most cannot, or the owner does not like playing the games on the laptop. One important thing is not charging for WiFi, people will not come if they have to pay for internet. It would also be good if you had tournaments for different games with entry fees and prizes, that is a great incentive to get people. I do not know about how to get customers during the day, but since you say you have a way, I guess you're covered there. If you ever do open one in the subarbs, you would know that I would come!
When I was in college I worked a Office Depot and would always get punks coming into the store and messing up the computers (that was Windows 3.1 days). Anyhow, learn how to lock those systems down tight or there will be lots of admin you'll need to do.
:)
The pool table is a good idea.
Having good computers would be a big plus as a lot of people just can't afford computers today that need 650W power supplies and 500$ video cards and a couple of gigs of RAM so if you have that they could play some of the newer games with lots of the eye candy turned on. If you could get some Lan Parties going that would be cool, maybe some cash prize competitions every once in awhile for individuals or teams of players.
Maybe have a wall of computers that are for checking email and Myspace and the web and not for gaming (that could save you some money by not having to buy all really high end systems).
Sell lots of variety of energy drinks
The best gaming place i've been is a gaming bar. Get people in for a beer and some death matches works well there. Make sure you have comfy chairs, headsets for teamspeak, good keyboards/mice. Promotions are always good, the place here had the local rock station hosting a gaming night (like they usually do at random bar X around town), and have gotten a few tournaments sponsored by game companies. Colleges near by are a definite must, and be open late, 5-2, not 9-5.
Seeing how most people have viewed (and enjoyed) Internet porn, I would recommend a room for pornographic viewing. Considering how your gaming cafe would have high powered machines and broadband Internet, this would be the perfect use of your equipment. Plus, it might keep some pervs out of the local libraries. Hope this helps.
In the Phoenix, Arizona area, there are a few... not exactly gaming _cafes_, but a chain of small businesses called "The Front" who basically offer computers with installed games for around $4 an hour (They also sell paintballing supplies. Go fig.). The main draw seems to be mostly as a continous LAN party. On Saturdays the place is loaded with teenagers and young 20's types playing mostly FPS and a few RTSs. A few will also play WoW, Diablo 2, etc, but the emphasis is on LAN competition. It seems to be doing great business. I've personally had many good times playing LAN CS with friends and random people we meet at the location. While it offers little in way of extra offerings or amenities, the draw seems to come from human to human interaction in LAN games. In game chatting is rarely used, and a ton of yelling and cursing (disallowed by managment, of course) can be constantly heard, along with softer whispers of strategy here or there. Excellent placement next to a pizza joint and a few carry out resturants helps too.
Why don't you drop them a line?
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I recently got the Dell 30" display and it's awesome. It might be a cool idea to have a couple of extra "pimped" systems with the Dell 30" to play on with SLI and all that jazz. I'll tell ya, Counter Strike Source at 2560X1600 looks pretty great (as does WoW)! Maybe you could charge a few extra bucks to play on the really nice systems and it could be a thing that gets people to come into your shop to see the boutique machines. Maybe even have a little spec sheet next to the computer talking about all of the parts that are on it, what type of RAM, what speed, what type of HDD and if it's RAID or not, the video cards and how much memory they have, etc. This could get people to come in and talk about your stuff and then stick around to do some gaming and buy some drinks and so forth.
if you want to profitable you have to sell beer and ice cream at this gaming cafe... this devastating duo will ensure your success.
I will bend like a reed in the wind.
The best thing you can do is get affiliated with Igames.org, you get a wealth of information and ideas + support from hundreds of exhisting owners.
I ran my centre, Capture The Frag here in a small town ~80,000 with 2 other pc and 1 xbox center and we did alright, surviving about 15 months.
What ends up killing you is the price of the games, the stupid licensing from companies like valve and the cost of supporting your hardware/upgrading and making sure the machines are maintained.
Get a license for Deep Freeze, it'll be your best friend.
We made a good deal of $ but it mostly went to advertising and paying for the property lease plus games, remember you're not buying 1, you're buying however many games for however many comps you have.
In the end, after about 15 months, i got sick of working 100 hours a week for no pay, its SO much more than just hooking some comps into a hub and going.
Find some place that has LOTS of traffic and a market that can support such a store. Crystal Lake or Gurnee is not going to cut it, nor any place west of Randall or south of US 30. You need to find someplace with foot traffic, where kids can come and visit after school, but some place close enough to keep adults in the place. Perhaps near a Community College might do.
It doesn't matter how well you manage your place, if customers aren't walking in, you're screwed.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
I happen to work at Howie's Game Shack (howies.com), where we have over 250 computers and 45 xboxes. I certiantly can't go into details, but when done right it does work.
GenCon is going on right now - one of the few 'round the clock events held.
Were you here, you could likely either post a message of some type (e.g., cards with an email address -- a throwaway because of a spam magnet) or interview people at random
(I don't go SouthWest of there during May (Indy500) two weeks ago (Brickyard 400), the F1, or Gen Con. I was born without the racing gene and I won't say anything about GenCon. The state fair is going on this weekend and I love riding on the tram (the tractors all run biodiesel) and could spend all day watching the people. The missus gets bored of that quite fast.
Don't listen to the naysayers. People who've tried and failed and given up. Of course they're going to say it's impossible. It might be impossible, but they're not the people to ask. Especially in a business that has had some successes already.
Their failure wasn't that their chosen business was simply no good. It was that their business plan wasn't very good and they simply didn't have what it takes to run a successful business. The fact is that most small businesses fail within a couple of years. And most successful entrepreneurs have a few failures under their belts before finally "making it."
The slate guy learned a valuable lesson: He learned how not to run a coffee shop. He also learned how to almost ruin his marriage because of it. But he applied the lesson by giving up. I think he made the right decision. He clearly couldn't hack it by his own admission. But if he'd tried again a couple more times, I'd think that was the right decision. He'd clearly have the perserverance to eventually succeed.
If the naysayers convince you to evaluate your business plan more critically, or change it in some way, that's fine. There're always details that could escape you if you don't consult enough resources. If they convince you not to even bother then you're not an entrepreneur. Be content working for someone else.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
The parent post is right. And add to that: in 06 I don't see why you *must* pay rent on a retail location. Your target audience isn't the young gamer. It's an older crowd that remembers having fun playing games before they went to work.
Here's the order of events as I see it.
1. Go to *every* place that has people sitting down, even for a few minutes. Coffee, bars... nightclubs.
2. Corner the head-honcho and tell her you will bring the PC's for a game night and you want a cut of the business that night. Talk to somebody that books nightclubs to figure out what the nightclub is used to paying.
3. If you get enough enthusiastic yes's then step 4.
4. Lease PC's and LCD's
5. Advertise, Advertise Advertise!
6. Run game nights.
7. Profit?
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
To draw customers, you should have promotions like game competition nights with prizes for winners and drawings for anyone that shows. It will draw customers, but make sure that you still maintain a profit margin. Or you COULD try an alternative focus, perhaps offering food and drinks and offering admission to the gaming facilities as an amenity this allows you to possibly maintain some business flow while most of the gaming community might be preoccupied with work or school.
A couple thoughts from me.
Prepay *sweaty clap* Prepay *sweaty clap* Prepay... I've helped start up a major internet cafe and has been running for six plus years. It's the place the national news uses for any "computer" related shots. Two things brought success to the place, prepay (the on going success story) customers. Take the money and run, there is no need for debt recovering, when people split for "emergency reasons" they aren't leaving you in the lurch. Second is get some known gamers off the forum and employ them for a month or two, they'll pass the word on through the forums/chat channels and this'll really get people to know about your place. Then they will slowly want to game instead of work so you lay them off nicely and give them a "gold" status
Ask Adrenaline Zone http://www.adrenzone.com/
Their Cambridge, MA location is doing well, kinda picked up where Cybersmith left off.
Palo Alto has a place called Neotte. This is a tea bar with WiFi and a power strip at every table. Everybody there is on a laptop. The tea is about $4, and they have a modest selection of bakery items. It's the next notch up from Starbucks.
Perhaps a upscale gamer cafe where you bring your own laptop...
There's actually this place here in Brooklyn, NY that my friends and I call the Xbox Cafe. It's a large room filled with about twenty 50 inch JVC plasma TVs and each one has an Xbox 360 hooked up to it. I think the place is a great idea and my friends and I sometimes go there to relax and play on a system none us have. The prices are reasonable too. $5 per person, per hour. If more people play on one TV, it becomes less money per person. The place also has every game, and has multiple copies of the popular games. I don't know how the people (2 people are in charge) keep the place up since they almost don't charge anything, but I guess they didn't have to renovate anything so they didn't spend money on anything other than TVs, systems and games. I guess it's profitable since the place is still in business. It's a great idea also for the neighborhood kids.
Its a gamble..
Times have changed, between the tv, xbox, massived amounts of bandwidth, and cheap hardware, keeps people indoors. I do get the concept of "people getting together", but everything accomplished at a "cafe" could be done at home. (with out the extra fees)
It all depends on your area, where i live (northern CA) PC ownership is very low. The local library has "Free" 10 free machines just FOR Net browsing. As for larger cities, Ownership is alot higher.
I wish you the best of luck, but if its gaming related, youre gonna need high end machines, ofcourse throw in the switches, cabling etc etc ( commerical pipes, (or tubes what ever) will add up quick.
-- I Dont Deserve A Sig I Have Bad Karma
In Shanghai, Beijing, and every city across China, you walk into one of the many i-cafe's and they are full of people playing games. Although many are dark, strange places where social disfunctionality reigns, they do killer business providing the youth with a gaming atmosphere that they seem to enjoy. The reason they enjoy it is because there are many people in the same place playing games, creating an "exiting" atmosphere...
One has to wonder about the long term social consequences of an entire generation of 20-somethings spending 75% of their free time (and brainpower) in internet cafes playing games!!
Real men don't need signitures!!!
Good luck man.
With $500 gaming rigs and cable for $50/month it would be a hard sell to bring gamers out of the comfort of their own homes. I think the best way, as some others have said, would be to offer as many services as possible. And do it with style and panache. Get a decorator, make the space comfortable and cool to look at. Offer coffee(good coffee), pizza, tourneys, shit maybe even rent a booth to a tattoo artist. Maybe double as a music venue at night. I just think you'll need more than 5 beige PC's and a router.
the mods may say you posted flamebait, but to me it's a flame that warms my heart. rock on, brother! --chebucto
Are you under the impression that this statement conveys some information? Like are we intended to know if that is a week, a year, a decade, or 50 years or more?
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Disclaimer: I've never been in a gaming cafe. But I've run a small business for 20 years, so the following advice is mostly about the business side of it.
1) Your job is NOT running your cafe. Your job is improving it. Owning a small business is a red queen affair: you have to be constantly improving just to stay even with the competition. Do every job in your cafe just long enough to know how to do it well. ( This will be anything from doing taxes to fixing hubs to cleaning the toilet. ) Then DELEGATE.
2) Your territory does not end at the door. OK, legally maybe it does, but you must treat the area immediately around your business as your territory. Clean up trash, cover grafitti ( immediately ), get rid of panhandlers. If something goes wrong immediately outside your business, it is not your fault, but it is your responsibility.
Get to know your neighbors. They can be helpful, or they can hurt you. ( This is especially important in your case, for many of them may initially view your clientele as troublemakers )
Join your local business association. Get to know your local cops.
3) You may have drug dealers and hookers of both sexes trying to use your place as a base of operations. Get rid of them. Not only do they give the cops a reason to cause you problems, but they will be competing for your customers' money.
4) Decide exactly what your business is. Yes, it sounds silly, but many owners don't really know what line of work they are in. In your case, you are not just in the business of offering games. As several posters have noted, most people can get that at home. You have to offer them an experience that they can't get at home.
A) Coffee and food will help. It does not have to be great food + coffee, but decent and reliably so. ( which many people don't have at home because they are too busy playing games. )
B) Have at least one hot babe working for you. ( Most gamers don't have one of those at home ) It helps if she is not an idiot, too.
C) Create a social scene ( most gamers don't have that at home, either ) This means catering to women. Keep them happy, and they will hang around, and then the guys will hang around too. Find out what kind of games women prefer. Have plenty of them. Keep the bathrooms clean.
D) Have a clear statement of expected behavior ( no smoking, no fighting, no booze, etc - whatever rules you think will do best ) Be very, very clear about what standards you expect of your customers, and then stick to them. Be prepared to explain why those particular rules are important to you. A large number of gamers play games because they find the rest of the world to be confusing, irrational, and hypocritical. Very few of them have a social environment that makes sense at home. E) Keep asking yourself 'What can I do for my customers that they can't get at home?"
There's a lot of times when I'd like to be able to play a game of CS:S with some friends that don't even have PC's capable of running the game but would have a blast in a 6v6 LAN friends game. Or, perhaps I want to go and meet some fellow game players that I might find online later on. Maybe my PC is broken, and I want to play some games.
It's like a rebirth of the video arcade, but it's more captivating.
Some things that a game spot should avoid:
- Ruthless monitoring of the players. If you have the game police watching everyone and barking every time someone does something you don't like, it will keep people away REAL fast. Make sure you have a supply of keyboards and mice. They're cheap. Don't worry about them so much.
- Tailoring to the very young kids. While families might visit a gaming center once in awhile, you don't want to alienate your core customer group by forcing them to be proper little gentlemen because sometimes a young kid might play. Some ediquite is a good idea, but be too strict and you'll drive them right away.
- Limiting internet usage. Don't limit internet usage. Sure, you could block porn sites, but don't block everything else.
A game cafe should have a method of quickly regenerating a PC to "defaults" and should have a couple machines on stand-by. If you don't have to worry about users screwing up Windows, you don't have to be the PC Nanny.
You should also provide stations for people that want to bring in their own PC's. You could charge the same amount of money, but let people use their own equipment. If I am going to go to someplace like this for a bunch of hours with some friends, I want to bring my own PC, my own LCD screen, and my own keyboard+mouse.
I've been to places that break all these suggestions and I'll never go back. It would have been great if they weren't so strict. I mean, gamers want to hang out, play some games, yell at each other, and have fun. Let them do that and you could be successful.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
I hope I'm not to Johnny-come-lately with this idea (read: too far down on the list of comments to get noticed), but be two-faced. I mean, why not? You're dealing with two different clientelles, right? Why not have two different places for them to be.
Here's what I envision. Someplace in the back, maybe near the bathrooms or whatever, you have this seperate gaming room for the hardcore gamers who like to host LAN parties and stuff. Make it glass and see through (it'll be a nice style and it'll attract people into it who normally wouldn't go in, and will also add to the atmosphere of the cafe part), but make it sound-proof as well. This will be a place for gamers who wanna go in and use headsets and trash talk or have small little LAN games and trash-talk amongst each other. Maybe even make it a premium area. Like, hey, you can sit out in the cafe and game for free, but you gotta play the pre-installed games, and you gotta be quiet about it. Pay $5, though . . . you can get up to 4 hours in the 'gaming booth', install your own games, be loud and boisterous, do what you want.
Heck, a set up like that, you could rent that room out for LAN parties and birthday parties or whatever else you can think of.
Just an idea, but I think one that, if implemented properly and with more thought than I've given it in the past 5 seconds, will really make your idea take off. Kudos.
Putting the 33k in G33k.
We have a place here in the 'burbs of Atlanta called Game 'n Brew.
You read that right, games, and good imported beer. That's the key. Beer.
Not sure how well it does, considering it's not in a great location, but one near a college I would imagine could do very well.
I actually helped run a gaming cafe for a while. It was a blast, and I'm not even a gamer!
The place bled money and went under due to terrible, horrible, ineffectual, shooting-themselves-in-the-foot-daily executive management that spent more energy fighting among themselves than actually doing anything positive. When they weren't involved the business actually went pretty well and was on track to make a profit.
I don't want to post too much on public formums about it, but if you (or anyone else) would like a little more info about my experiences feel free to email me at ccarlin@physics.tamu.edu
My main tip: focus on the environment. Think sofas instead of classroom. Build the home of a rich gaming enthusiast.
I've run one in Italy, for a couple of years. First of all, when you open it don't excpect too much customers, and don't stress yourself of why it's not going well: it will! Then you should consider putting A LOT OF TIME into it. It is a time-eater experience, long ours, but fun! Definetly, go for it!
ciop ciop
In South Korea there is a building regulation that means all non-residential constructions over 3 stories MUST have at least one such gaming room. They must also have an English teaching institute, a taekwondo school and at least two haidressers.
Backspace struck me as more a coffeeshop where people happened to be playing games than a gaming cafe that served coffee... its in the heart of downtown portland, open wicked late, has cute alterna-grunge waitstaff serving coffee to keep you up, and has carefully cultivated a vibe of "come.. hang out here..even play a game or two perhaps". It's about much more than the games themselves.
Krakaboom is much more about the games. With a vibe that only a franchise can sustain, I think they make ends meet despite their atrocious location in the basement "arcade" area of the mall because 1) Proximity to a high school and old orchard mall, where there are lots of busses 2) the neigborhood: relatively rich kids (i think either cook or lake county where I live has one of the highest per-capita incomes in the country, second only to LA county) who can't drive yet and need some way to stay entertained besides the huge mega-multiplex right next door 3) The fact that their a franchise, which allows sharing of the losses and a little more room in the profit margin. And even with all these things going for it, I've still rarely seen the dank pit full...
My favorite place in surburbia and it is a recently opened and flowering gaming cafe. It serves a purpose for not necessarily the outcast kids but a lot of kids from the varying high schools around in Columbia, Maryland (there's 8 high schools and it blew my mind when i first moved here, though I moved from a similar sized place). They don't just stick to pc, they do consoles too which really helps the friend and communicative aspect. The two guys and their wives/girlfriends who run it are always there, responsive and generally there to work with us. They offer enough variety and good priced snacks that the no outside food rule works fine, I'm really loving this place and they're actually expanding when they can serve about 50 gamers at anytime as is(which I have seen filled to capacity). So I think if you're looking for a model of inspiration these guys would be it. (Note: It's not only teens who hang out there, but they are my and the main demographic)
As any business knows, cash is king. Planning is essential to make it through the years.
:-). Don't try to be everything at once, that means you're spending before you earn which is worth avoiding. Get the basics up first - systems, chairs, premises, backup, etc. Leave the fancy stuff - flashy decoration, huge advertising, costly extra features - until you can pay them from income, that way you keep your borrowing as low as possible. Borrowing costs interest which is money that doesn't work for you.
:-).
Your principle problem will come from having to pay bills and not having money for it. You get money by (a) your original investment: be careful of what is known as "the cost of capital" - anything you borrow will have to go back (b) paying customers: whatever your target audience is, be ready to shift this as fashions change - this can be almost seasonal.. (c) whatever franchise you manage to get going local businesses may be interested in banner advertising on your default logon screens.
You spend money by running the business (read: pay your bills, staff, live AND set aside enough for maintenance and equipment/business refresh - the cycle of that depends on what you want to do and how destructive our clients are
The equation is simple: if you get your income (including future planning) to rise above your spend and you have about 3 months running costs in the bank you have a winner. As a matter of fact, if you have a winner of that scale you should pump some of your profits in doing it again elsewhere and create a chain but NEVER try to continue a business after it shows not to work where you you put it. You'll know that in 3 months or so (so you know what your potential loss is before you do this).
Ultimately, if you've got 3 shops doing this with profit you have in principle something that you can sell on for quite a bit more, but let's tackle that when you get there
Oh, and try to avoid personal risk, companies can be set up with 'limited liability' but some companies want your shirt/house as guarantee - be careful because it can be used on a succesful business to take it over. The bankis by NO means your friend. They may help you, but they're a business too. The more you can avoid external money the better it is, and if you do get a loan, make sure it's one you can clear ASAP without penalties. Try and stay debtfree where possible, that's the stuff that will keep you awake at night.
Good luck - starting a business is a nervous enterprise but it's also very rewarding when it all starts to tick.
= CH =
Insert
We've got one here called "The Matrix". It's really nothing spectacular, but they've got decent machines and a good selection of games and overpriced beverages (only place in town you can buy Bawls).
I'm no expert on business and such, but I notice they have a tendancy to pick poorer neighbourhoods to set up shop in, where people are much less likely to own computers and have internet access. This means they got a lot of people coming in simply to use it like an internet cafe (just to check e-mail, chat on MSN...) to supplement the gamers.
So to generalize this, try appealing to a broader market than just gamers, maybe?
ND
This statement is forty-five characters long.
Cromulent. I hope this embiggens your recollection.
I gave up completely on gaming cafes, as every single one seemed full of teen boys screaming obscenities across the place (surely sitting near each other would be easier!). It's hard to have a good time when the kid next to you is screaming at his f@#%#$% c@#$% friend at the top of his lungs.
have a room in your house with broadband and internet and games. Have it as a private members club. Employee's get free access. Then if you make a loss in Business, you save personaly :O).
Seen few very sound idea's mentioned in the thread:
Run after 5pm with few mates - means keep your day job and lower risk and more fun.
Run a laundry business in conjunction - people have a lot of dead time at laundry places.
Thats a key point - combine with another business that will compliment in some way. Another point - look at were people have dead time.
I would personaly go with the 5pm model to start with, combine perhaps with working with another business that did say, IT training for individuals and you leverage the resources during the day and night. You can then combine and expand the two together at a later stage.
I would also look at having a coffee bar, or perhaps have place next to a coffee shop and run a promotion that gave discount if you came in with there coffee and membership holders of your place got discount at the coffee shop. But doing your own alright coffee at low mark up would be the way.
As location goes, I'd look at locating near a major transport hub. But a gaming cyber cafe would do well in a major business area charging premo prices and would only need to cover the lunchtime crowd.
Another idea for you and this is something that would perhaps be something to look into when wimax comes into play. A portable cyber cafe run out of a nice converted old school London Double decker bus. Can move to your location then. So many options then as you can play follow the crowd, be there a pop concert or football match, school closing time, after work rush and lunchtimes. Would be fun.
Also given the drive towards non smokers, IF your a smoker you could ponder the smoker only cyber cafe and get all those desperate smokers who cant smoke in public, but in concenting location/have membership cards (easier for login details to do that); Well.
So, as a standard model of just dedicated internet and games it would appear unless you find a magic location, your at best going to break even with a little beer money. Combining the business in a complementary way, be it laundry or coffee or some other cunning buit of lateral thinking then, you have a good chance to make a comfortable living.
All the best.
Gaming cafés seems to be pretty sucessful here since you can find one on almost any street. But make sure that you have comfy chairs because that's pretty important if people are going to spend a lot of time in it.
Also, don't make it too expensive, AFAIK people usually go to the cheaper place. The place I usually go to charges 15kr SEK per hour (15kr SEK is about $2 USD) and then you get 15 hours of gametime when you become a member which costs 100kr SEK (about $14 USD).
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Great idea, would be awesome fun and super profitable if you make sure you tap the right niche market. Niche is in right now (eg youtube, myspace) and if you can take advantage of that wave, best to you. But I tell you, your best bet will be to do that within the city limits as opposed to out in the suburbs. Plug it into the Lincoln Park area and give those DePaul students who dont have the urge to get smashed with all the other fratboy meatheads the opportunity to lan it up on the hottest, newest multiplayer titles in a night 'scene' of their own...and serve drinks.
How about buying a smaller ammount of really high end gaming set ups with 26 - 30" displays, surround sound, SLI etc? This could work out to be too expensive as the computers will quickly go out of date and require replacing to stay high end. Along side the high end machines you could offer good, healthy food instead of junk food. Parents will want their children eating healthily if they go out.
It depends on how much money you have and if there's a market for this sort of place where you are.
For a commercial operator like the cafe you've been describing, I think it's a recipe for disaster to let third party machines into your network. Think of the damage these machines can cause if they infect the rest of the network with some nasty rootkit/worm/trojan.
I work in a place like that, located in Varna, Bulgaria. It's a chain of 9 cafes, maybe the largest in the country. The business is quite successful, lots of people come and go. Customers can use colour laser printers, scanners, web cameras as well as play games or just suft the web. Internet penetration is not too big here, so I guess this helps running such a thing. So does word of mouth, advertising, hosting game tournaments (this year we had ESWC and WCG qualifications) and more advertising. You can check out the site here (it's mostly in Bulgarian, we have an English section though). The name is a ripoff too.
I don't know what lessons can be applied to the U.S., but FWIW, game cafes are big business in Japan. In addition to computers with games and broadband connections, they typically feature large libraries of manga, CD's and DVD's, plus various types of fast food and complimentary drinks. There is often a subset of computer carels that are basically fully enclosed cubicles with lockable doors, where privacy is assured, and really big, luxurious reclining seats that people would be comfortable spending the night in. These places are often open 24/7.
Anyway, make sure there is a decent amount of cooling in the building and make sure the games run alright.
in six months, on the East Coast (Boston). How about that? So, I know plently of what not to do
1. Put the cafe in a building that is not protected by the National Landmark Act. This will keep you out of conflict when you try and comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act.
2. Put the cafe somewhere you can get cable, or satellite TV. (Of course make sure that you've go a fat LAN to boot)
3. If you're going to sell food or drink:
a. Sell it behind a counter, or in a vending machine. Selling food out in the open will lead to vermin.
b. If you're going to sell drink, make sure your bathroom is publicly accessible.
4. If you can, (and I bet you can't), allow people to smoke. MMORPGs that are released in South Korea are designed so that you can control your character with one hand, and chain-smoke with the other. (Also used to work for an MMORPG company)
5. Get a location with as much tourist foot traffic as you can. Being just a general internet cafe helps to pay the bills while you generate a stable client base.
6. Don't spend any money on flashy crap. No Aeron chairs, no Alienware computers. Keep the space, and the website, simple.
7. Go with a stable, trustworthy computer locking system. Make it card-based, not password-based. Don't go with a vendor that doesn't expose the whole OS when the computer is unlocked. 'Gamer OSes' are presumptuous pieces of crap. Re-ghost all your machines from an offline server every day at least.
8. Charge $5 an hour or less. Anything more, in terms of more money or less time, feels like a ripoff to customers.
9. A gaming cafe requires that you get special licenses for the games you allow people to play.
a. Blizzard is ridiculously expensive. If you've got a Korean community next door, it's probably worth it to get the licenses for Starcraft and WC3, otherwise don't bother.
b. Get games that _sell well_. Don't get new games until you know how they do. Sure, I enjoyed Tron 2.0, but I didn't have to pay $7.50 an hour to play it.
c. Get games that have no licensing cost! What a concept! get as many of these as you can.
10. Get headsets with microphones. Allow people to customize their area with their own mouse/mousepad/keyboard/headset. Crazy FPS players do take that seriously.
11. Do something wacky to bring people in. The best Internet Cafe in the Boston Area serves bubble tea. I have advertisements for gaming cafes in Tokyo that offered manga libraries, on site tanning salons, and onsen. Do well, and emulate them.
Basically, the cafe I worked for did all of those things wrong, and so quickly died.
make sure you get a good internet conenction. If you were in the ny metro area I would have recommended lightpath but they dont exist outside this area. A t-1 wont be enough. Also warning electricity bills will be huge.
I think you could add value to your cafe by creating a gamer community, a place for netplays, a cyber athlete training center. But in this case, it would be a specialized placed, optimized for certain networked games, such as World of Warcraft or the old n' good Counter Strike, for example.
Don't make your place try and look like the exterior of a Dell. Don't do "ultra-hip" or "modern". Get a real designer, and DON'T try and make things look "cool", make them reliable, sturdy, and interesting. Use interesting chairs and tables. DON'T overuse black plastic things. And no matter what you do, be sure to have as much innovation as you can. Use stuff that most gamer's haven't seen, like really cool mods or underrated games. Stock all the classics (HL:2, Warcraft 3, etc.) And most of all, have fun. The gamers won't like it if you don't.
Parent information is correct, informative and important. Further it wouldn't hurt to check into taking locally given SBA classes on writing a business plan, dealing with taxes/regulations/laws, etc. The last thing you want to do is cripple your business before you start it.
1. Restrict web access to Wikipedia.org.
2. Have only games like chess, checkers and backgammon installed.
3. Make 50% discounts available to kids who have done their homework.
It's definitely original!
I have a few words to say.
1. think "category killer" (ie Wal-Mart, Target, Dick's Sporting, Starbucks)
2. think "xbox 360 + HD tv" (ie Microsoft)
3. think "convenience of sitting at home and playing great looking massively multiplayer games": (ie couch potato)
4. think "out of business in 6 months"
I own a small retail business in a small town. Whatever you "plan" for overhead, double it and you will be close. Have you run a breakeven analysis, so you know what the minimum usage needs to be JUST TO COVER RENT AND UTILITIES? Do you really think that many kids and young male adults are looking for other thing to spend money on?
Many will come when you first open, but successful business require loyal, repeat customers. Without constant capital infusions and HARD WORK, your shop will start looking run-down and out of date, keeping people away.
I imagine in certain VERY high population density areas (ie downtown cities with lots of apartments), and a very large start-up budget (3 times larger than your highest estimate), and 3-4 years of VERY LONG HOURS and HARD WORK, you would have a greater then 50% shot at seeing some profit.
Good luck to you.
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
...if it had ducts. Lots and lots of ducts.
Oh, wait that's how my basement dwelling looks like now. Never mind...
There is one in Indianapolis: http://www.netheads.com/locations.html
Thats what a "gaming parlour" (as they are called here in India) uses to seat its customers. Its quiet comfortable, although, long hours on it will cause serious spinal problems in the long run. Also, they use large screen TV and only XBox's and PS2's.
I ran a non-gaming cybercafe for 3 years, and, around the same time, someone else started a cybercafe that was mainly about gaming. I never got rich, but we lasted longer than the gaming cafe.
One problem is simply per-hour income. For the vision to work, you need people to spend hours per week in front of one of your computers, and the hours they have available will be the same as other people's. Their total spend per month on doing this is limited. So you are going to be lucky to be very get a couple of dollars an hour out of people long term. What hourly salary do you want, and what are the overheads of the building, taxes, electricity, heating, insurance, breakages... If you count your time, I'd say you need a dozen customers all the time you are open, and that means a much larger capacity (because if regulars can't get in when they want to they won't be regular for very long).
One huge overhead is the cost of games licences. The people who looked for games in our cybercafe didn't say "Do you have games?" they said "Do you have version Y of game X?". I'm no expert on the gaming market, but you are going to need several different games, and you are going to have to buy new licences pretty often.
Another is the hardware. Our cybercafe used neolithic PCs and diskless LTSP, which was fine for browsing and WP. Even then, we found that people expected decent screens. If you want to provide a good gaming experience, you are going to need expensive kit and regular hardware upgrades.
And your competitor is what the kids could do themselves with their laptops and $20 of networking kit, or their desktop machines and ADSL. AFAICT, the cybercafe down the road folded when the relatively small client base worked out they could network their own computers and cut out the middle man.
Yes to everything that has been said about decent coffee, decor, customer relations, but I don't think that will pay the bills. I'd say it's a hygiene factor, ie lousy environment = no customers but spend on better environment does not give a linear increase in revenue.
Finally, don't count on mixing serious Internet use with serious gaming unless you have two rooms, because the clientele is different and the atmosphere people want is totally different. We picked up lots of Internet customers from our competitors because of the noise level generated by games and gamers.
Virtually serving coffee
Great topic. Very cool discussion, and idea.
One thing to keep in mind is that this is a BUSINESS. Something like 50% of all businesses fail in their first year, and 80% fail by year 10. Here are some things to think about while starting a business:
* Do you really want to own a business? You give up a LOT of freedom when you own a business. You can never have a day where you're just "punching the clock". When we started our business it was 3 years before we could take more than 4 days off in a row. When an employee is sick, we have to come in.
* Find smart people, and ask them for help, they'll usually say yes. When we first started in business we went up and asked smart people who were way out of our league for advice. They all helped us. One person I met actually helped us to hire some people, so we could see how it was done, for free! Another person goes out to lunch with us once or twice a year, and tells us LOTs of tips from their related business.
* At the end of the day if you're not paying everyone's sallary (including yours), AND making a profit, it's not working. Know your numbers, and understand what your costs are. I have a friend who's started 4-5 businesses, none of which took off, and the #1 reason is he doesn't watch the numbers. Whenever I see him I ask him "Are you on track with your forecasts?" and "Did you make money this month?". He can never answer either one of those. He always says things like "I'm pretty sure...", or "I think that...", or simply "I don't know".
* Have someone you're accountable to. It's easy to "skip" important things for a couple of months. I have set it up so that I send my bi-weekly financial checkin to one of my partners. In addition to the past, I look at the future. I report on things such as: Cash received per year broken down by month, how we're tracking month-by month based on our forecast and target, any upcoming new expenses (i.e. raises, new hires, tech purchases, building repairs, rent increase, etc.). Because someone else reads this I'm accountable to get it done, and I also have someone tell me if I'm looking at things with rose colored glasses.
* Pay yourself a fair sallary as soon as you can.
* Know how many years until you make your initial investment, plus your sallary back. Ideally that should be within 2-3 years. If you end up a year behind schedule, that's still only 4 years tops.
* Don't forget your new shiny computers will break and be out of date very quickly.
* If your projections tell you will loose (bleed) money for 6 months, assume it will really be 12. I've seen a LOT of companies have to close up shop, RIGHT as things turn around because they were optimistic about how quickly they can make their money back. Bite your numbers so they don't bite you. Have PLENTY of cash on hand. Don't invest more than you're willing to loose.
* If you don't have management experience, REALLY think about what sort of culture you want. Read "First Break All the Rules" and "Ideas Are Free". Both great business books that apply to all types of businesses.
* I know it's your money, and your butt on the line, but don't be a nerotic control freek. No one likes to work for a dictator, and your customers will know too. Besides if you have trustworthy employees, and are willing to let them make decisions, you can actually leave town for a few days once in a while.
* Make time to work "on" the business not "in" the business. If you have to work from home one day to make this happen, do that.
* Understand your ramp up time. For instance if you're eventually going to have 20 stations, but you're pretty sure you won't have over 7 people at a time in the first month, only buy 5 machines. Then buy a new one every 4 weeks. This will get you up to 20 stations in just about 2 years, at what time you'll need to be replacing old machines anyway. It also spreads out your cost, so that in 3-4 months, if you don't have the traffic you thought you'd have, you can postpone purchase of a couple of machines, and
Assuming you have three main sources of revenue: gamers, tourists and a sandwich bar, the sandwich bar will make the most. Business can be very erratic by time of day, of week and year. On average you can expect 25% to 60% usage.
Depending on where you site it, you may end up providing the local junkie population with somewhere to shootup of an evening. If you intend to run it 24 hour, you will need some kind of security and/or swipe card activated locks.
The basic services will just about cover your costs. You have to generate more income with 'added value'. eg: Personal login accounts with full office suite.daily, weekly monthly passes at a discount. The discounted cards can only be used between office hours eg 9.00 to 5pm. Special games nights @ $10.00 all night thur, fri and sat. Last but not least printing. Set up a mini print shop that will generate additional revenue. Photograph quality prints, scanning, OCR etc.
I have seen a few cafes that were sucessfull mainly because they were run by the same knowledge people who owned it. Like a new restaurant it will be full the first few months. To keep them coming back you need to do things like organize tournaments and continually upgrade with the latest must-have Role-Playing Game.
davecb5620@gmail.com
I co-owned a Network of PC's that we rented for people to play on. It was back in 1998-1999 timeframe. It did well, back then people didn't (and sometimes couldn't) have high speed internet access to play games. Not to mention to find 4+ friends that all had good PC's that could play the games. It was a good experience, and we would have kept up the business if it wasn't for one thing. The cost of the game licensing was outrageous. At the time, Virgin Games bought up the license rights to almost all popular games, including Red Alert, WarCraft 2, Duke Nuke-em, Decent, and other games. They wanted somewhere in the neighborhood of $10,000 annually PER GAME, for 8 PCs. Obviously, the business would not be viable with this type of blackmail. ID had good licnesing, basically stated you reported your gross income to them, if it crossed a line, then they charged. This way, they didn't slam you when you are small potatoes. Bottom line, if your going to invest a significant portion of your life savings, RESEARCH the license costs of all the games you would like to offer first. If the costs aren't viable, you could offer the games (buy 1 copy for each PC) without paying the "special cafe tax" these companies demand. But one day a lawyer may knock on your door, calling you on it. BTW, because of the licensing fees, we eventually sold the business, after running it for two years, it was time to re-invest. At that point we couldn't see re-investing on a business model that could be destroyed at a moments notice by the gaming companies.
Yeah, I clicked the wrong link (it was late, I was in a rush)
:(
Always use "Preview"
But today the market is not growing anymore. At least here in Denmark.
Around 1996/1997 it was possible to open a small café with some 16 seats and get an annual ROI of no less than 50%, but the market has stabilized now. We also have the problem here in Denmark, that the income tax is very high, so any café willing to break the law and employ black labour, can slash 25-30% off their prices and still make (steal) a profit.
The largest, local telephone company around here has started a concept called Boomtown, which is centered around huge (100+ seats) high tech gaming cafés. It seems to be a good business for them, but it has taken millions of dollars to get it up and running. They are planning to take the concept abroad.
The most successful places I've seen all had snack machines/drink machines. Stock them with pretzels, chips and other junk food that require something to drink, and have a coke/pepsi machine there also. If you stock them yourself you can keep the cost low and have stuff that the local kids most want, and keep the price below what a regular machine would charge (places like BJ's club actually sell snack machines) and you'll be making a gazillion dollars. If you get an automated coffee machine/cappucino macine also, you'll be making money like a damn rocket from all the kids going crazy. Make a deal with a local pizza place for a comission on any orders placed and you can make even more. It's all about the side items.
You might as well offer PC repair as well. If you are going to have a "PC" arcade then you obviously know how to fix computers. Might as well take advantage of this since you will have the space to do this. How about selling video games as well?
They've been around for a while. But they have cheap rent, lots of space, and a downtown location. I suppose the basics are the same for any business; low overhead and location, location, location.
Hi! We have many-many-many Gaming-Net Cafes in Greece. Also stores with Game Consoles and PCs For Games. Net Cafes are almost 24-365. They charge with the Hour. The evolved from net Cafes to Gaming Cafes. Counter Strike and WoW (and many others ofcourse) are bringing them a lot of Money! You can see them playing any hour of the day! Late at night - early in the morning! Console Stores are for younger ages. They have every console. You can go there and choose a game to play or rent it, with a console and take it home. You can rent games (go home and copy them - that's nasty!-) If you are thinking for this kind of bussiness then go for it! It's very very profy!
As a matter of fact, there are legitimate licensing solutions--they just don't cover all the most popular games, at least not yet.
The best license management system out there, bar none, is Valve's "Steam" (http://steampowered.com/) system. Most people are familiar with this is the basis for their internet-based software distribution model, but there is actually a special version of Steam that is available for use ("required" actually, if you're licensed) by game centers. This "cafe" version of Steam solves three problems:
(1) it does license management: you pay Valve for a certain maximum number of concurrent licenses, regardless of how many actual PCs you have, and Steam manages the licenses for you.
(2) Normal game software updates can kill your internet connection's bandwidth--World of Warcraft is the worst (but others are almost as bad): it runs a custom BitTorrent client with no bandwidth limits on every machine running the game; every time people started playing WoW in my 27-PC cafe after an update had been released, no one else in the cafe could do anything on the internet, including simple web surfing. The cafe version of Steam uses a local Steam server (which you have to provide) to fetch updates once, then disburses them to local PCs over your LAN, as needed.
(3) The cafe version of Steam lets customers save their games, automatically copying the relevent game state files onto your local Steam server. If you don't have something like this, no one can really play single-player games, since they have to start from the beginning every time they come in.
And no, Steam isn't just for games from Valve--there are lots of other publishers that are using Steam now. . . but if the game publisher doesn't have a distribution deal with Valve, Steam won't help you.
There are several other companies that are trying to do their own version of Steam specifically for game centers, but, as is often the case, these problems are actually a lot harder to solve reliably and consistently than they appear at first sight, and Valve has at least, from what I can see, a 2-year head start on everyone else trying to do this.
Could you do it yourself? A friend and I wrote all the software (http://fun-o-matic.org/) we used my game center, and we tried to tackle license management, too, but never got beyond the early development stage with that particular module--I'm convinced there is no technical reason why it can't be done. However, as a previous poster pointed out, just because YOU think you're being fair and legal doesn't mean the game publishers will see it that way, so unless you have a special licensing agreement with every publisher, you'd be running some legal risk, anyway.
I can't thank you all enough! Even most of the not-so-positive posts were constructively so. 90% of the posts were well thought out and had some sort of information to make note of. I've even received responses in my forums at http://www.mmorpguniverse.com/. These people wanted to contact me privately regarding my post. Thank you SlashDot and thank you SlashDot Community! I will do my best to keep you posted on my progress! HAVE A GREAT WEEKEND!
Gaming Cafe= the new "arcade place" of the 21st century?
Also, consider hiring "volunteers" for some shifts and instead of pay offer them free access to everything. Could save you a bit of cash.
In terms of setup....there was a place in Lake in the Hills near Crystal Lake that had a SWEET setup. Huge couches setup in a configuration to give groups some privacy, inward facing clusters of computers spread throughout the place so friends could gather together, huge screens for console games, etc. Yeah, that place went out of business pretty quick.
The ones that stay open it seems are the ones who minimize the glitz and focus on being clean, having good hardware, friendly employees, and good advertising. And when it comes to advertising the name of the game is LOCAL! Look into coupon programs to give to your loyal customers that gets them a discount or a reward if they bring a friend who buys at least 5 hours of time or something like that. Or gives the first hour of a 3 hour block free. Then print a bunch of these coupons and have the kids distribute them to their friends at school.
Offer tournaments with prizes people actually want, and make sure for the love of god that your place is the type that girls and parents don't mind entering. There should not be a wall of odor when you enter. The goal is to make people hangout there.
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Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
Q: What makes people go to an internet cafe / arcade?
A: They have hardware that many people don't have at home.
The bottom line is: analyze whether or not you can provide a service, at the location you choose, that people cannot access already in the comfort of their own basements.
I live in Winnipeg, Canada. The last internet cafe closed 4 months ago, and the last arcade closed 2 weeks ago. You are thinking about entering a dying industry. Tread carefully because you likely cannot win.
Have a smoke free area I once went to a gaming place and did not like the smoke at all and some towns in this area are talking about no smoking laws.
Use deep freeze to keep the systems in the same state as a lot of games need admin to work. Deep freeze resets the system back to where it was at each reboot. But you still have to put games updates, mods, system updates, and driver's updates into the image at least one a month or more.
Get your parts form a place like http://www.tigerdirect.com/ as they have local pick up and it easy to return bad parts to them.
you may want to have other things like pinball games to bring people in as there is no good play to play them. Gameworks has them but they don't fix them that well.
I feel my center is succefful (http://www.theqwerty.com). I have been in business for two years. I've been able to pay my bills and make a little money for myself. It's also a fun business. How you measure "success" depends on you though. You probably won't get rich running a gaming center. You also have to be able to deal with kids and bad parents. Lots of parents will try and use you as a cheap babysitting service. Then you have the kids who have never been displined by their parents, so you get to deal with all their problems. Luckily, I have a lot of good kids in my store that make up for the bad ones.
No one can tell you if your future game center will be successful or not. It depends too much on you, the owner. How you can manage stress, details and time. How good you are at securing business deals and contracts. How good you are at advertising, marketting, promoting and spreading the word around. How well you can manage customers and keep them happy... There's so much involved that depends on you that only you will know. As an entrepreneur, the only thing you can do is dive in and take the risk to find out.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
There are tons of other issues I could list but these sprang to mind first. Good luck!!!
-K
I owned and opperated a Lan centre in Kingsville, Ontario, Canada. It has a population of 6000 people. We had six computers which were lanned together, with access to the net.
Fact #1: You will make TONS more money if you are selling food/snacks within your centre.
Fact #2: Allowing kids to play "on tab" never ends well. One kid at our lan centre ended up owing us over 300 dollars over a month period. His mom had to come in and pay. He was never seen again.
Fact #3: The success of a lan station has little to do with what "NEW" thing you offer. Your lanstation will be successful if you make friends with your customers. Plain and simple; they will come to your lan if they feel welcome, and "one of the gang."
Fact #4: You will regret BUYING computers. I found it ten times easier to rent computers; as this allowed me to upgrade to BETTER computers for little to no fee.
Fact #5: If you provide your lanners with high end keyboards/mice/headphones; they WILL be stolen. No matter how much security, or how much you trust your customers; they will mysteriously dissapear.
Fact #6: People would much rather bring in their own computer/laptop to the lan. This is a GREAT thing. You can charge them a nomimal door fee (which is all profit) and sell them snacks all night for a HUGE profit.
Fact #7: Pizza Pockets sell like crack to lan goers.
Fact #8: If you allow open access to your computers; idiots WILL screw them over. Do not allow outside mods to be put onto games; for you will find yourself with a network filled with virus' (I can't stress this enough)
As long as they sell Mountain Dew and Cheetos too they'll do fine.
The days of the digital watch are numbered.
Get your parts form a place like http://www.tigerdirect.com/ as they have local pick up and it easy to return bad parts to them.
I hate to disagree but I must. If you're running a gaming/internet cafe or whatever, really any business that isn't building and repairing PCs, then don't build your own computers. There's no cost advantage, and there's a large maintenance disadvantage. Pick a configuration from Dell, Compaq, whomever that serves your needs and buy all of them identical. Get 3 years or more of next business day on-site service for a pittance and then never have have hardware failure be your direct problem.
Having opened and closed one for 3 years in the heart of the SF Bay Area, I can tell you: -It will be alot of hard work. Be prepared to give up a good chunk of your life. -You won't make alot of money. If you want that, do something else. -You are competing with new game releases/technologies all the time. -Depending on your market and location, you are dealing with annoying and evil teenagers (not all of them mind you). -You need alot of capital for each upgrade round. Sometimes you just won't have it. -It's a seasonal business. -You will have fun at least. -You will learn alot. My advice, don't do it.
There is one on Clark street, just north of Fullerton (sorry, I forget the name).
I toyed with the idea a few years ago, but the way my idea would have worked out would have taken a lot of planning. What I figured was you want to have a lot of other stuff generating revenue inside there besides the gaming/internet, making it somewhat of a side dish rather than the main course. Sell some really good coffee/tea and related stuff, do stuff like a Kinkos, maybe a restaurant, etc.
What I was thinking was making it more like a place to hang out, rather than having a 1980's "high-school computer lab" feel. Which means you would also need a lot of space, meaning the rent is higher, and meaning you have a higher need to attract steady customers.
You might also want to offer free WiFi, then charge for people to use gaming computers (or faster wired connections).
1. think "category killer" (ie Wal-Mart, Target, Dick's Sporting, Starbucks) 2. think "xbox 360 + HD tv" (ie Microsoft) 3. think "convenience of sitting at home and playing great looking massively multiplayer games": (ie couch potato) 4. think "out of business in 6 months"
I do strategy consulting, and although your cautions later in this post are worthwile, the comments at teh beginning are just fud. First, the cafe is a service business, not retail, and that puts a heavier premium on the customer experience. With that in mind, category breakers are not as deadly because expereinces work best when they are cutomized or localized. Lots of good advice has come from this discussion on making an environemtn that works for your area. I would take a look at Pine and Gilmore's The experience economy for ideas about creating customer experiences. It can give some insight into the process and logic of it.
As for the doom of out-of-house entertainment, we are still going to movies and live shows. There is a draw to being in a shared place. Even basement-dwelling MMORP-ers like to intereact with real humans face to face. Figure out how to make an environment that is appealing to heavy gamers as well as casual players and you can get your loyal clientelle. Heck, that loyal clientelle can be part of the draw for other gamers.
The best advice for any new business is be cofident in your actions, but do your homework first. Know your operating costs and startup costs. Like the parent said, know your break even point, know necessary number of player-hours you need, know your metrics intensely. And keep good records - not just financials, but keep records on what games are getting played, when you are busy, how much income comes from what demographics. Knowin what is happenign in your business in the first year makes decision making in hard times much easier.
The Gaming Cafes here are successful because a lot college students don't live on campus, so the owners don't have to compete with University LANs like in many American cities. Two of them make more money by having two sections, a normal cafe and the gaming section. Because most of their drinks cost almost nothing, they make gaming+drink deals which cost less than $2 more than the same amount of time on their computers. The more time you buy, the cheaper the drink is. They even have Food+Drink+Computer combos. Those deals are very popular and it makes many of the clients buy more than just an hour.
I believe you should try to get a better location than the suburbs (downtown would probably be best). Offering WiFi would be a great addition. Having an area separate from the gaming area maybe just with tables and chairs sort of like a lounge would be cool. You could try to make the lounge area more suited for businessmen (who could be your daytime customers). I'd try to get some sort of food area going. Maybe try to incorporatee a Starbucks? Definitely get comfortable furniture. Plan events like big parties with giveaways or tournaments. Maybe have an area where you can just chill and watch a movie?
Hi I'm from Ukraine I have my own computer club (in my country people say so))hence 2001. It's my hobby - not mach money) Yangsters plaing here game like Lineage2, WoW (MMORG) and CS1.6 War3 TFT and other. Computer club may be usefull if its have at least 40 mashines!!! If less - its only hobby) Club mean society of players - if you can make this society - you may be can have money. In my contry piople pay about 50 cent per hour for playing in MMORG, and 40 cent simple game. I have enither buizenes and CC (computer clab) an additition for this. Sory for my poor English - i'm only learning this great thing) BB
Peraphs you could also setup a counter to sell/exchange used games and peripherals, there are a couple gaming cafés around here [Montreal City] that do this on the side and they have been in business for a good amount of years.
There were 2 in Naperville, neither did well. Only one of them is still open, NTWLINK in downtown, and it has been near empty every time I've walked past it. The owner is on old Lucent employee trying desperately to make a living so she'll keep that going until the bitter end. There just isn't a reason to game at a cafe in America.
I ran one in Columbus Ohio during the 'Doom' craze. It's lots of fun to build a store, but a lot less fun to sit there and run it. I learned a lot, of course. And now with everyone having high-speed internet, why does anyone have to go to a brick and mortar store and pay?
i rtualOverdrive
http://mattwalsh.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/?topic=V
Does it hurt to hear them lying? Was this the only world you had?
Extrapolating from the replies to this story, the best you can hope for is to stay alive for 3 years, and if you're lucky you'll even be making money by then, in which case your only hope is to sell and get out of such a volatile market.
What do you do when presented with business opportunities like that? Run. Run away screaming and get as much distance as possible between you and the presentor.
Disclaimer: IANABP (Business Person)
Hire fairly attractive women. They don't have to be models. Both guys and gals *like* to be around friendly, attractive women. Do this and your chances of success will increase greatly. How you can do this without actually being discriminatory, I'll leave up to you. But if you're serious about running a business like this, you'll find a way.
If aspiration is a virtue, achievement cannot be a vice.
Having a cafe that only works off of it's computers is a dangerous thing. Remember that after a year or so, your hot machine is going to be rather pasé. This means that you're either going to have to cycle your computers through the store on a regular basis, or be able to use the 'old' machines for another purpose after a relatively short time. Also, as the market shifts (and the computer market shifts far faster than most), a business model that seems pretty decent today may not be as good a year or two down the road.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
I ran an internet cafe for a few years, pretty difficult business, depending on the local market
For example, in Vancouver BC (due to all the competition) prices are usually $1.5->$2.00/hr and most places have horribly outdated, ill mainained systems.
The outdated systems is one of the first things to think of, people hate playing on older machines (even moreso on ill working unpatched machines, but more on that later).
A good solution to this problem is to lease your PC hardware so you can upgrade every six monthes
If you plan to offer many games, i suggest you setup a file server with ISOs so you don't have to hand out cds whenever someone wants to play, they just get destroyed or stolen.
Make sure all your equipment (pcs, monitors, mouse, keyboard, etc) is secured, people just love to walk out the door with stuff, also don't allow double access to your facility (meaning, no back door) and try to place the front desk beside or near the only entrance.
I've had kids walk out with PCs, mice, ram, etc we even had a crew of guys break in during the night and steal equipment (when i'd just installed locks on the PCs the night before!)
Its a really difficult business to be in, and do it right.
I'd suggest attempting to find an internet service provider who will give you one IP address per PC at a reasonable price, because some games wont work otherwise. If you take this route make sure you put a router/firewall inbetween to secure inbound and outbound traffic (i used an HA cluster of two linux machines running ipables with a 1:1 SNAT configuration). This is a huge benefit in more ways than one, i won't go into detail
Do not get a cheap ADSL connection and put a NAT router on it, that is just lame and you will have problems with many games. Also people will no be able to host games on the internet. I choose a hybrid configuration where each workstation had an RFC1918 IP address however they were externally mapped (with a 1:1 relationship) to a routable IP address by the router/firewall. This had the advantage of allowing stupid games to work (that wouldn't properly host lan games if they were on a routable IP address) and also allow people to host their own internet games. Word of advice, look into NAT Hairpinning, you will need this to work for other local PCs to join internet games hosted by a local PC.
You will also want to look into rate limitation, you don't want one guy downloading or running a P2P app and degrading network performance for every PC on the network. (do not use CBQ, if you end up using linux, it creates latency).
Now for the most difficult thing, keeping all the systems virus free, clean and patched. This is an incredibly difficult task. I used a program called Goback, with this i can give every user administrative access (games need it, you will NOT *trust me on this, i've spent many days trying to get all our games working properly* be able to put them into a windows user account) because it tracks every system change on the drive level and reverts back to the know good state on every reboot.
Want to install a trojan? Virus? Porn? Spyware? Trash the system? Mess Around?
no problem, just need to reboot and its back to the known good state. Also with this configuration in place you don't need to install resource hogging (and essentially useless) applications like Anti-Virus/Spyware, etc. You really want to keep the resident state of the machine as clean as possible.
A word of advice if you choose this route, make sure your systems have more than enough ram (1gig +) because any swap usage is treated as a filsystem change and Goback will force a reversion if the buffer exceeds a certain (hardcoded max) threshold of a few gigs of difference.
Make sure that you buy your PCs in groups and keep the hardware EXACTLY the same, in this way you can create ghost images that can be easily deployed. If you want to expand and need new hardware, you can just create new ghost images (although, this does take a huge amount of
Totally. Kill people, while your laundry gets done. This is a freaking awesome idea, and I wish you were in town. Why look at overweight people stuffing their nasty soiled undergarments into the washer, when you can kill people instead?
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
3 year old hardware may get to slow to play new games at high res and dell and other over cageg for ram and video card upgardes. And they only have gamer chip sets in the high end systems.
I moved from Ukraine to the US 3 years ago; back then, gaming cafes were hugely popular (and, AFAIK, still remain very popular). I was spending there an hour nearly every day - with friends, of course; and when there were 10 of us it wasn't that easy to find a place where all of us can play at the same time :) That was a lot of fun. All we needed (and what all the places actually provided) were computers with LAN/Internet that had decent specs and popular games (Counter-Strike and Starcraft - perpetually, UT + 10-15 other games which most people didn't care about much - due to piracy, that was the easiest part there :) ) The price there was way less then $1/hour, and minimum was usually 20min, so ANYONE could play.
All I can think about the US is that $4 an hour, with $1 or $2 minimum will definitely get you people; maybe $6 will work, but a person with $2 bucks still should get in.
Also, I'd be happy to go to a such place, but I don't know of any such places around where I live now in Brooklyn. So good luck to you, and, hopefully, these places will appear all over the US, sicne the ability to yell "YOU BASTARD!!" to the guy who made a frag out of you in counter strike is definitely worth all the money paid for it :)
I'm both the IT Director of a college campus and the parent of a 20-year-old heavy-gamer son and a 17-year-old hangs-out-in-cafes daughter, all in the Chicago suburbs. I did not take the time to read other's inputs so this may be duplicative, but here's my own thoughts on what you need to do:
1. Make the place hip-looking. Not your idea of hip -- you want 13-25-year-olds' idea of hip. Places where my kids like the ambiance include Jamba Juice, Chipotle, Noodles', and Starbucks.
2. Make sure you have beverages that kids can't get at home, or are too much trouble to make themselves: Fruit and yogurt smoothies, cappuccino, espresso, and so on. Don't imitate slavishly, but take Jamba Juice as an inspiration. Also a must: Jones Soda in bottles.
3. Provide free Wi-Fi; you can even make it "free Wi-Fi with any purchase" by having a daily changing password that is printed on the receipt. It would be very cool if you could let folks on Wi-Fi log into for-fee network games but I don't know if there is software out there that supports that; if there isn't there's sure plenty of folks in the Chicago area that could write it.
4. Keep the place spotlessly clean and replace anything that shows wear, preferrably with an item with the same function that won't show wear.
5. Hire personable, outgoing, and technically competent young people as front-counter and floor staff. A hard to find combination, but well worth hunting for (full disclosure: depending on where your business will be, my kids fit the bill and are both available...).
6. Follow my Dad's very solid advice to his college business students, based on his own and many other small-business owners' experience: DO NOT even start your business if you are not prepared to lose money for the first two years.
Hope that helps; I wish you good luck!
Here in Queens, NY we have an abundance of game rooms. It's sort of a backlash created by a large, immigrant population that pressures their kids to study and do well in school while being unable to afford a home computer or strictly regulating PC use at home.
Some of these game retailers full blown cyber-cafes that include LAN access and even host their own bakeries and stylish decor. Others are a bare room above a nail salon. Many have been in business for years so they can't be hurting for income.
If you plan to be open during school hours check your local laws. The success of these game rooms led to laws making it illegal in NYC to allow a school age minor into a gaming room during daytime school hours. The management are responsible for checking IDs and risk relatively serious fines for violations. The city decided the owners should be the parents.
Problems with your kind of business:
- People "just hanging out". You need to be making money off the bodies in your place of business, but you also don't want to be kicking people out either. You'll have to figure out how to make money off the loiterers.
- Is gaming your revenue source or is it more? Coffee shops sell alot more than just coffee. A good coffee shop will sell cookies, muffins, sandwiches, newspapers, etc. If the place is nice and worth hanging out in, the coffee, etc is usually more expensive. People are willing to pay more for a "package" and that includes the ambience of the location or reputation of the product.
- How do you get people to come in and pay to do something they could easily do at home? (People can make coffee at home; Why do they pay $3 for a coffee at a coffee shop? -- People can play games online at home; What can you offer to make them come to your location and pay you for the privilege?)
Either create a separate room or offer computer courses for the elderly during off-peak hours.
A friend of mine found that seniors loved to be able to come in, get email from their grandkids, then sit and talk to each other for hours and still pay for computer time even though they spent most of the time not using them.
It gives them something to do together in a social setting.
Your customers are going to have to be people who don't have gaming capable computers. If they get them, they're not likely to be your customers any more.
See subject.
Use widescreen monitors.
Get most of the big games produced 2004 and on, and include the best mods with them. (i.e. DC and DCX for BF1942, PoE and OPK for BFV, etc.)
Cater to the "Average Joe," and the "nerd" who knows everything about computer.
Maybe offer classes (?).
Also, 4 words:
Cheap and tasty pizza.
Come down to Indianapolis and check out Net Heads in the Broad Ripple area. They've been in business for years and seem to be doing well.
I go to school in Vancouver, BC, and on long days we go to the Rush Arcade in Richmond, its southern suburb. It has 250 computers with nearly every PC game released over the last two years. However, its success seems primarily due to the huge young Asian community in Vancouver, who seem to enjoy videogames more than regular Cnaadians (just like all of those stories in Korea). Is your demographic right?
The majority of comments above seem to assume PC gaming. PC gaming is great and important, but the real focus of your business should be consoles. There are a lot of reasons for this. Among others:
PC gaming tempts you to set up something that looks more like a life-sucking classroom. Console gaming suggests a living room because that's what it is designed for. Which setting would you rather be in?
Everyone has a computer. Not everyone has every console. Your business will allow you to more efficiently provide all consoles that your customers want. Even if you only provide a single console it will be a good focus. While everyone has a PC to play together, not everyone has the certain console needed.
Focus on the core business. Avoid temptation to branch into crap like prepaid cellphones.
Hire decent people, not necessarily gamers. Employees who only play games occasionally tend to be better employees overall.
This is all based on my experiences running a gaming cafe that was fairly successful.
Heh. We had one open up two years ago here in SW Michigan (you _know_ who you are, you stupid pinheads). They found a unique way to corkscrew into the ground: allegedly, every one of their two dozen PCs was running a bootleg copy of Windows XP.
I live in a little "city" called Charlottetown on the eastern coast of Canada. It's the capital of my province and largest population centre on the island. Including the "Greater Charlottetown" area the population is probably somewhere between 65 000 - 70 000 people. About a year ago a gaming cafe opened it's doors downtown named AdrenaLAN. Originally, I was curious to if the business could survive. The city is a small place, and I didn't think that there existed enough of a demand for it. The owner opened up with something like 10 top-end PCs (not sure how much they cost, however). Obviously being a new place business was slow at first. I'd pop in from time to time and often be the only person there, or there'd only be 2 or 3 PCs in use. That was about 10 or 11 months ago. It was just a dark little upstairs-commercial-space area with poor AC and poor lighting. Fast forward 1 year and now he's expanded a little. I think he has something along the lines of 18 or 19 PCs. The place is usually packed depending on what time of day you come in at. People have to call ahead and find out from the owner if there's spots open within the next little while and get a spot reserved for themselves (well, I do, anyways). He's the only BAWLS vendor in the area and kids walk in just to buy in. He's got a brand new AC unit that keeps the place nice and cool and as far as I know he's expanding things a little more with some more PCs. He allows the place to be booked for all-nighters, and the poor guy often gets back-to-back all-nighters booked on a weekend. Now granted, I don't have raw financial data for you to explain how good he's doing, and despite being a regular and friends with him I've never been so forward as to ask him how he's doing financially. He's got ads going on the radio and in papers and had an article done on the place in a few different papers I think. Considering the activity though, and the buzz that surrounds the place I can't say he's hurting too bad in the business side of things, I could be wrong, though. "AG" - as the place is dubbed - seems to be the place to go for anybody that has a computer around these parts. He's the only business in the area, though. Well, there's one down the street but it's shady, dirty and hardly respectable. There is no competition for him, but it's also a virgin market that was a pretty big gamble considering the population and the interests of the teens in the city. When new games are released and added he has showcases for him, he has centre-sponsored tournaments and centre-sponsored all-nighters (as opposed to the personally booked ones) and offers deals (like 3 hours for the price of 2) during the week days (Mon-Thur). When I first walked in I thought it was a great idea, but I didn't think it would have legs, mainly due to the population and the attitude of the kids, but it's quite a good place - very respectable and very clean, and the owner's good with the older folk and the youngin's that come in. Definitely a place I'd let my kids hang out if I were a father and they were of the age. So, as a third-party viewing the business, I'd say it's doing pretty good.
I live in a little hick town (actually the area is 3 towns, total of about 9,000 people, and me and my friends (we're freshmen) have nothing to do. We're the geek group and Xbox Live gets kind of old, screaming at a TV lol. You would probably get some support from locals doing it in a place like mine which has a lot of meth, you could advertise something like "Video Games, the new anti-drug" lol as in giving kids something to do other than getting in trouble. Peaple have said stuff like it should be near a rich area where people have lots of time, well not necessarily. Put it somewhere where kids have nowhere else to spend their money. Checklist for success: 1) Small community with a lot of kids. 2) Very busy central area, if you don't live in a small town you would be surprised how low rent is compared to city areas. 3) Offer console games, a lot of kids don't like PCs because they just don't know a lot (not calling teenagers dumb, I know my way around computers a little bit, but not many kids bother to learn computers as consoles are cheaper and easier) 4) Offer uber-fast connection speed, some people mentioned this is no longer a selling point, but in small towns it still is as most people can't get DSL/Cable unless they're smack dab in the middle of town, I only recently had DSL become available to me. 5) Offer things that can't be found in other areas. Again, you city dwellers would be surprised at how remote some towns are. I have to mail-order Bawls by the case if I want it while a lot of city people just pass it up in stores. 6) Build your own computers, and ask your customers what they want out of them. Do most of your consumers like Intel or AMD? Nvidia or ATI? Do they think side windows and cold cathode lights are the l337 coolness or do they not like the contrast light side windows and cathodes give off? 7) Be very, VERY friendly. In farmington, about 30 miles away, there is a game shop that is doing pretty well now because the owners are, as mentioned before, pretty loose with what goes on and don't care if you're a quarter short, and they'll play DnD with you. Play in the tournaments, laugh when you place dead last in them, and don't be afraid to loan your frequent customers an hour or so of game time every once in a while. I'm not saying you should let someone play for free because they're spent more money than anyone else, but reward being a good customer. Back to the game shop I was talking about- I spend a good amount of my money there, and I just lost some dice. "Oh, you can take a pack here, they're only 50 cents." That's all I have to say, don't flame me please =).
I would like to invite you any anyone else that owns or is thinking of starting a game center to join iGames (www.igames.org). iGames has over 900 game center members from around the world working together to build a better game center industry.
We have many members that have been around for years and are doing better than ever. We look forward to helping to first help you make the decision on whether a game center is a good business for you and if so, how you can be as successful as possible.
Best regards,
Mark Nielsen
iGames Executive Director
there was cybernet in chicago suburbs, but that closed down in like a year because of all the illegal things going on inside, other than that, it was doing well in the business. i actually liked that place.
I've had this as a far off plan for my area for quite a while, but by running across this a few days ago I've found some pretty good advice. (Still digging through it actually) I'm even thinking of going after it before the end of the year now.
And since you're in the Chicago area and I'm in the Kansas City area where you wouldn't be competition, I thought I'd offer you this list of cafes to help in your research.
I've already established a succeeding computer repair and consulting operation so this is going to be an add-on to it in a city where there is nothing to do for entertainment except start smoking. (Or go out and ride a bike, but who does that anymore.) I'm also expecting training classes to be a popular use of the computers, maybe even a dedicated lab style room for that and business/copy,print use. Plus, having a projector in there means renting out the _room_and_equipment_ (reducing the legal issues of gaining public viewing licensing) for people to watch movies/tv events as another source of revenue.
What I'm seeing overall is not to focus on it being a business working to draw money out of people's pockets, but rather focus on building a social environment where people will continue to come back, be willing to freely spend their money, and bring other people to experience it. (of course, spend too much on decor that's not useful in bringing in anything to help pay for itself is no good either.)
Best of luck.
45-5F is the new 09-f9
As someone who lives in the Chicago area I can say that a great place for this would be in Evanston in the area of downtown near Northwestern University. This is something that would reallly attract college students IMO.
if you visit http://www.nocturnalegames.com/ , which was a place that I used to visit where I used to live, you just sit there and wait through the shifting close out messages. You should not open a gaming cafe. This gaming cafe has already closed down after years of managing to survive. My local gamging cafe called internet worx is going out at the month of august. I suggest you don't open a gaming cafe. If you are going to keep your business open, you will need to charge 4 or more dollars per hour and have an almost no-vacancy place all the time during the day, which is highly unlikely. Don't bother with gaming cafes.
Wiredwarfare.com in Brandon, FL has done well enough to stay open. Located in small suburban strip mall in rapidly growing bedroom community of Tampa, FL.
1: If you plan on getting rich, invest your money and time elsewhere.
2: Folks come to socialiaze. Your computers must run well, but do not need to be cutting edge.
3: Keep costs low. Sounds obvious, but you'd be amazed at how many screw this up.
4: If you are not approachable or generally don't get along with people. Stay away.
5: Be prepared to not make a dime for 2 years. Budget accordingly.
6: Your place should look nice. Paint is cheep. Use it.
7: Make your pricing easy to figure out.
8: Locate where people can WALK to you.
9: Near Middle/High School = Good. Near College = Bad. College kids have no money.
10: Watch your employees. They should not be giving perks to friends.
11: Join iGames.org. Great member forums and info, plus some game licenses ONLY available there.
12: No margin in selling new games. Don't add that to your plan.
13: How tolerant is your significant other? This is a long painful trip.
14: If a location seems to expensive, keep looking.
15: Locate far far away from another cafe/center even if they stink on ice.
16: Advertise in every high school paper in your area.
17: At the start, hand out cards to customers where if someone else brings it in, the original customer get free time.
I'd say more, but you really need to join iGames.org (http://www.igames.org/) if you are serious. Also feel free to check us out. We're in the Notre Dame area in a city called Mishawaka. My place is called LanLizards (http://www.lanlizards.com/).
I thought about doing this too and going with a sort of 80's Arcade motif. Along with all of the above I'd throw in some upright classic gaming cabinets like Pac Man, Donkey Kong etc. or maybe a few MAME uprights. Then some Air Hockey and Fooz Ball tables. Pump in some loud early 80's music. To top it off you gotta have Hot Dogs and Nachos. Maybe free nacho fridays. ;)
I had toyed with this idea as well I had planned on a CyberCafe in front and a large gaming area/e-conference/classroom/lan party room in the back I thought that a location adjacent to a college would be beneficial because; -colleges are always running out of classroom space which you could rent them -college kids are slightly less destructive than highschool kids, have money, need a place to hang out -college computer labs close at night
I seem to recall one call LAN Werks (sp?) that had numerous pictures on their website. What struck me was the obvious high amount of capital that was sunk into the place: large screen TVs all over, "current" PC hardware with 19" or larger flat panels, comfy chairs, a copy of all offered games on every PC. I'd guess $250,000 just to fill the space and open it up.
I'd like to see a successful business model of this, because based on my experience just regarding PC hardware, it's a continuous sinkhole.
Players will want relatively current (less than one year old) hardware especially for the high-demand, fast-moving, latest FPSes. I would think it might be possible to rotate out 25% of the hardware every year without losing your shirt: buy new boxes, retire the oldest ones by donating them for a tax write-off.
As someone mentioned, most players come to these cafes to add social interaction to their games. The one piece of LAN Werks (or whatever it was) that I saw as the real money maker (just like a movie theater) was providing food. Each station had an intercom where players could order food and drinks. Then they'd either run a tab on a credit card or just pay cash for every order. Obviously, there's a premium on the food because it's being "delivered," and the markup for food and drinks is typically outrageous anyway. $$$
I think another factor that would need to be considered is operating hours. Some posters mentioned 24/7 cafes. I see this as being desirable to the players, but difficult for the owner. Not only do you need staff to man the shop at all hours, but you have higher security risks. Security would need to be tight anyway since you've got a great deal of equipment that could walk out at any time. Perhaps the food and drinks service could be limited to certain "prime time" hours to allow for reduced staffing.
Having wireless and providing space and food/drink service for walk-in customers is a no brainer. Heck, a lunch cafe with wireless might provide enough regular income. I know quite a few players who like to get away from the office just to play at lunch.
Good luck with this endeavor. I'd really like to see one of these cafes do well and set an example of how they should be run.
Dell was just an example. However you can also lease the equipment on a 1 or 2 year cycle to manage costs and provide newer equipment. You especially don't want to actually buy it and assemble it if you're going to be doing so every year.
Now that Dell owns Alienware that may be the most logical route to go. I'd also not get too hung up on delivering 200+ fps on the very latest games, that's a small segment of the market of gamers who'll care and you'll drive your costs way up to keep them happy (when they won't come game with you anyhow).
http://www.gamingcenters.net/index.php has been around for 4-5 years now, and seems to be going strong. I don't know much else about it, but I'm sure you could contact the owners from the site.
check out backspace in portland OR. It is a coffee shop/Gaming cafe/Art Gallery which is just awesome. http://www.backspace.bz/
I've seen them work in Lima..... Peru....... in the early 90's......
That counts......
Doesn't it?