Gaming Cafe - Anyone Else?

I haven't seen one and I live in Florida. But then again I live in a place where counting is a problem top some people...

I havent seen any around either might be somethin to get into

I looked into doing starting one up.. I know a few guys that have them in calli but it's rough biz to be in. Not a ton of profit unless you do other things with it.

they make good money $1-2 an hour and ya have like 50 machines running plus you get a $10 signup fee and you can sell cokes/candy etc.

Pretty good business. I know of one in Manhattan that sits on $30k a month in commercial space. The pipe they use for the network is a 100mbs cogent pipe @ $3k. It has about 50 cpu's in it and leases out the basement as rental office space (cubicle rental, conference area and mail service) They bought all Alienware computers and everything else is expensive so they have to be turning a nice profit to still be around 3 years later. They charge $6 an hour and is only half full most times but of course during the prime time (after school) it seems to run at 90% capacity til close.

http://www.web2zone.com is their site if you want to see it.

I was looking into starting one here in my hometown. Then as soon as I was about to start aggressively moving on the project a gaming cafe opened. LOL!

Oh well there might be room for competition. We will see

DH

There aren't any in Montreal. I thought about it but I'm not so sure it'll work.

use to goto one right here in my home town called "The Matrix" very good place. they had a afterschool program for kids and all.. they shut down like 6months ago...

I've been to one here in Indy...it was a cool place but not my cup of tea...I'm not really into network gaming.

I think to really make a nice profit at it, you would have to make a place that's a hip hangout at night and an educational center during the day. Invest in business training software and get local companies to send their employees to you to get certified in different programs and such.

Teach classes to old people on how to use the Internet. Teach classes on how to use Ebay.

one opened up here yesterday, just down the street. I'll probably check it out soon.

They are one of the sites we did analysis on. It's a cool place. =]

Thats a lot of hours in the day and those sort of employee's don't work for minimum wage. I did a lot of looking into it late last year, and if it weren't for "surer" things i wouldn't have postponed it, essentially you're right in that it has to be a hip hangout, but you have to look at making a lot of your cash selling syrup coke, candy and frozen food purchased from the local super market at 400% profit and warmed up in the microwave quik-e mart style.
I talked to town planning and they spoke about having to fork out for extra car spaces for the "parking need" business would generate out of my own pocket at like 8k ea.. at that point i kinda cooled down, invested in a few other things and am still looking at positions for one and ways to make money during the day without employee's wages severely cutting into the not-exactly-impressive profit.
I wanted a cool gaming cafe i could own and drop in at to casually fuck around.. but in a smaller town (30k) it's much more of an owner-operator type business..

talk the theking, his brother runs one successfully.

There are several here in Vanouver - most of the successful ones are run by asain dudes and are kind ghettoish inside... open 24hrs per day adn $2 CDN per hour.

One place place counterstrike on their LAN all the time and there are no headsets and everyone cranks their speakers its fucking nuts sounds like a warzone down there.