Gaming Cafe's

Depends on what you mean by "gaming". If you mean strictly PC video games then it gets pretty tough. Kids are going to want top end pc's to play new games that their home computers cant run..that means continually paying top dollar for vid cards etc on a continual basis..all the while the kids are going to be bitching about the $5/hour or whatever you charge. Sounds like very low margins to me. Console gaming I think would have to be limited to essentially providing space/equip for lan parties. As fun as those are, Im not sure how much of a market there is on a day to day basis. If you expaned your definition of gaming to include board/card games, I think you move into an area thats much more do-able. Theres a mall by my parents house that has a giant chess board built into the floor with a bunch of timers and tables around it. There is always a crowd there of varying sizes..it does help that there is a fairly high russian immigrant population around but its an older crowd with money to spend and they enjoy the social aspect of the games..the coffee and food shops around that area clean up. There is nothing like that in my current area and I often wonder about starting something up to provide it. Although there are on-line options for all these types of games I find that I much prefer a real game with a real person looking at a real board. Finding other players is the problem..it would be nice to have a location that attracted people like that to find opponents.

I think it would really depend on what kind of clientèle you want to attract. Also, how would you limit the time an individual spent in your establishment? I have heard of some spending HOURS on a game. These aren't sarcastic questions, I'm really curious.

There used to be a gaming cafe in the area here, however it recently closed down. It's obviously a shaky investment, but I think it's definitely a feasible one. The problems with the place in my area was that they were in a bad location (more upscale part of town, pretty far away from the college campus) and the environment really wasn't very exciting. You walked in and you saw some people playing, but they didn't seem to be particularly enjoying themselves all that much. It was so very quiet. Definitely an environment where you'd want groups of people to come in or for people to be a bit more social with one another and do some co-op stuff or deathmatch instead of solo play. It would've been nice if all the computers weren't taken up by people playing WoW for hours on end. And on a side note, why would you pay $15 per month *and* $6 an hour to play World of Warcraft? Do they really have that much money to burn? Why not give it to me? I'm taking donations.

Best chance for one to survive in my opinion would be right next to a college campus.