LAN Centers

[Josh123]

Would opening up an LAN gaming center be a viable business? I've always been a big time gamer and nothing is better than getting together with friends and having a big deathmatch. I have always thought about it but never did any research about the process.

My wife and I recently moved to a larger town and from what I can tell there isn't anything around gaming wise that brings people in. I'd like to get some of ideas from you guys and know what you think.

 

[Tweak155]

From the ones I've seen, it isn't very profitable (they always look like a ghost town).

I imagine if you're picky with your hours of operation, there can be money made.

 

[lord_emperor]

From personal experience, it is not a profitable venture; still paying down my lines of credit.

It is however a great way to make (very little) money by sitting around and playing video games and was the most enjoyable time of my life.

 

[Tweak155]

I imagine this would only be profitable if you had consumables, most likely junk food, pizza, coffee, etc.

 

[LookBehindYou]

Here are my reasons it wont work:

Gamers don't socialize in person, with the exception of a few. Everyone has their own high speed connection.
Why go to a Lan center where there are rules. I can game at home and fap in between rounds, or pork my wife, get stoned, whatever.
The place will probably smell like b.o. most of the time.
People will spill drinks.
The non-hardcore gamers will come and fuck with people and try to start fights.

I can go on and and on and on....

 

[QueBert]

Depends where you live, out by me there are a couple huge ones that seem to do very well. One has been open for like 8 years and is always packed. They're open 24/7 and host all sorts of tournaments and other things.

This one's at a mall, where the rent is damn high. They must have 100 PC's, a very nice spot. http://www.howies.com/home.php?location=M2

The ones around here that went out of business did so because they weren't ran correctly. Howies is $5 an hour or $13 for an all day pass, and they stay busy.

 

[Josh123]

Here are my reasons it wont work:

Gamers don't socialize in person, with the exception of a few. Everyone has their own high speed connection.
Why go to a Lan center where there are rules. I can game at home and fap in between rounds, or pork my wife, get stoned, whatever.
The place will probably smell like b.o. most of the time.
People will spill drinks.
The non-hardcore gamers will come and fuck with people and try to start fights.

I can go on and and on and on....

Well played sir, this thread can be locked due to it being a dumb idea. Thanks guys lol

 

[guyver01]

My wife and I recently moved to a larger town and from what I can tell there isn't anything around gaming wise that brings people in.

There's probably a reason for that.

 

[gaidensensei]

Don't do it unless you have some grand model that isn't the same as the others.

When I grew up in CA, around high school in my time the lan centers started getting popular and there was one everywhere, you could find one every 5 mile radius from another. It also attributes to the fact that my location was very minority populated. Koreans in one section, hispanics in another, etc - GAMING lan centers were popular with them.

I came back this summer to tour around to see what's changed since then. None of those centers are around anymore. We're talking at least five that I have visited and been to off the top of my head. It's enough to tell me that this business venture isn't very successful.

 

[Schfifty Five]

Would opening up an LAN gaming center be a viable business? I've always been a big time gamer and nothing is better than getting together with friends and having a big deathmatch. I have always thought about it but never did any research about the process.

My wife and I recently moved to a larger town and from what I can tell there isn't anything around gaming wise that brings people in. I'd like to get some of ideas from you guys and know what you think.

Being a big time gamer is good, but running a gaming center like that goes far beyond that.

You may be ok with maintaining 1 or 2 PCs at home, but do you think you could handle maintaining, fixing, and repairing 50+ rigs?

People don't treat shit properly if it's not their own, so those things will break down fast.

 

[guyver01]

It's enough to tell me that this business venture isn't very successful.

Why would you go to a store and "rent" a high speed internet connection and computer, when, if you're really a gamer.. You ALREADY have that at home???

Gamers already have everything they need to game.. noone is gonna go someplace and pay MORE money for what they have.

 

[bobdole369]

I assume you mean "in the USA", because in Korea most gaming is done in LAN centers. I can't explain why the whole arcade scene didn't flock to these sort of places, but I've never seen one in the USA actually profit and do well. Everyones got a decent connection and a good PC it seems, so just like LookBehindYou says - why go out when you can Cartman it up "MAAAAA TOILET!!!!"

 

[ViviTheMage]

Me and my BiL wanted to start ones a few years ago....had a good business plan, just needed capital. We decided to wait, some stuff came up, that brought us back a bit.

So my new plan is, when madgenius makes a bit more money, I can make that the money maker, and have the LAN center for fun + face value. I honestly think this will work, I just need to find a proper location for it.

And to hit the 'we already have a connection at home and computer' you can rent space/power/tables from us @ xx per night, bring your friend and split it. The issue I ran into with that was curfew for certain age groups.

I also really like the tournament 'scene'. I miss it, I want to run tournaments (Minnesota majorly lacks these), prizes, get gamers together ... it's a shame how it's died since cs 1.x days...I really want to bring it back, even if it's not profitable, it would be REALLY fun, and madgenius.com would be able to back it if cannot go into black on it's own.

 

[gaidensensei]

Why would you go to a store and "rent" a high speed internet connection and computer, when, if you're really a gamer.. You ALREADY have that at home???

Gamers already have everything they need to game.. noone is gonna go someplace and pay MORE money for what they have.

The brunk of the customers in those places are teenage kids. Back then, a part of the reasons I went were with groups of friends, we'd have 3-4+ of us each time we went on a friday or saturday night after a meal somewhere. It was like an alternative to the movies.

We all had our own internet connections back at home when we were living with our parents (in HS), but not all of them had up-to-date machines. IIRC this was before AMD64's came out, it was when pentium 3's, tualatins, best video cards were geforce 2's and 3's and such. Some of them could not afford a system or didn't know how to build one, so these centers would even the field out for us, or we'd go co-op, our team vs the rest of the center, de_dust etc. Those were some of my childhood days...

 

[CrackRabbit]

I view LAN gaming centers as something of a bygone era, kinda like arcades.
They made sense when a powerful computer was stupidly expensive (more so than today) and high speed internet was scarce.

 

[Atomic Playboy]

You're only going to draw people in if you offer things that they can't get playing at home. Better PCs or a better connection could be a draw, but that's very costly, and you'll have to offset higher operating costs with higher rates (which people don't want to pay). Food and drink is a good revenue generator, but then you have to deal with people spilling things; it will get gross real fast. You could offer weekly tournaments with prizes; that could convince local gamers to start coming there for an opportunity to win stuff. But ultimately, I would imagine that it's very difficult to start a successful LAN center from nothing, especially if your business plan consists of "I like to play games all day." Building a successful business takes work; you wouldn't just be sitting around playing Battlefield all day. And if you did, the venture would probably fail.

 

[ViviTheMage]

snip

Yup, you need something to fallback on, so it's not your primary source.

I hope to eventually make madgenius the money maker, and a LAN center as a front

 

[QueBert]

Why would you go to a store and "rent" a high speed internet connection and computer, when, if you're really a gamer.. You ALREADY have that at home???

Gamers already have everything they need to game.. noone is gonna go someplace and pay MORE money for what they have.

It's an entirely different gaming experience, I had a good PC but I'd still hit the OG Netgames up the block because there's something more satisfying about owning dudes in person rather than online. We'd order big ass pizzas from the pizza place a few doors down and make a night of it. I'm a gamer, I have been since Atari 2600, but I'm also very social. Getting a LAN party together at somebodies house is always a pita. It was well worth the $10 I'd drop for 5 hours of gaming 3-4 nights a week. Also the weekly tourneys made a lot of people come regurarly. I never won one, but the $$$ price was typically $150'ish. They had one a week and the sign up was always packed.

 

[ViviTheMage]

It's an entirely different gaming experience, I had a good PC but I'd still hit the OG Netgames up the block because there's something more satisfying about owning dudes in person rather than online. We'd order big ass pizzas from the pizza place a few doors down and make a night of it. I'm a gamer, I have been since Atari 2600, but I'm also very social. Getting a LAN party together at somebodies house is always a pita. It was well worth the $10 I'd drop for 5 hours of gaming 3-4 nights a week. Also the weekly tourneys made a lot of people come regurarly. I never won one, but the $$$ price was typically $150'ish. They had one a week and the sign up was always packed.

$10, that's pretty cheap, haha. What year was that?

 

[honkydory]

I used to frequent lan centers a LOT (at least once a week for a 12+ hour session) back when i didnt have highspeed internet at one of my parents houses. All three of the places i used to go have closed (Euphnet 2&3, and Cybertron) It can be a profitable buisness, but the problems come when your 50+ computers start to become obsolete and need upgrades to play the new games that are coming out. I witnessed this first hand and it was the reason that cybertron pretty much had to close, they had AMD 3000+ or something Cpu's(single core non 64 bit) and like MX440's and a gig of ram. They ran counterstrike fine along with a few other games, but a couple of years down the line they couldnt even run most of the new games and the owner couldnt afford to upgrade all the pc's.

 

[SamQuint]

I have seen many in Southern California bite the dust. Hardly any serious gaming ones around anymore. The problem was always the young crowds they would draw. There would always be fights and the police would be called. Many cities starting coming up with special zoning laws and curfews to stop the spread of these places.

Many of them also got caught up with software licensing problems. Some were shut down when the software companies would audit these places to make sure all the software was paid for. Imagine having to shell out 60 bucks per machine each time the newest game came out. All it takes is one pissed off customer to turn you in to the piracy police and you are screwed if you can't provide receipts for every piece of software.

Microsoft is even going after internet cafes in China,
http://www.chinahourly.com/bizchina/1558/

 

[PingSpike]

I sort of feel like the demand for this has gone down as high speed internet has become more available and computer hardware has decreased in price.

 

[AyashiKaibutsu]

In every thread like this there's always one guy that lives near a successful one, but I think in the vast majority of America this just isn't going to work.

 

[Pantlegz]

There was one in my town that was also a computer repair shop. Then they became a computer repair shop, I'm not sure they're still around. I don't think he was making much money and since he had to license each copy of each game that would be played there was a lot of over head and he didn't always have the newest/best games or only had so many copies of some games. He was also an asshole.

 

[ViviTheMage]

In every thread like this there's always one guy that lives near a successful one, but I think in the vast majority of America this just isn't going to work.

Yup one pops up around here every so often .. fails within 1-2 years.