Gaming Business Good or Bad?

I've done it and left it twice and watched 4 or 5 other business do it and fail badly to the point of having their stores seized by creditors and all their items auctioned off.

1. Stealing is a problem. You can try your best to tie/secure things down, but people will steal regardless. Even stupid things like a mouse or headset and it add's up.

2. You become a glorified babysitter service for cheaper than any babysitter would even charge. What are you thinking of charging? Can't be more than $5 an hour and probably in the 2-3$ range. If you spend say $1000 per PC and maybe $500 on a console, flatscreen, controllers (and more controllers as they get broken a lot and fast and that add's up at $50 each). Then $50 a game for each system. How many hours do you need to rent each system to recoup the price?

3. You are going to need a fairly big rental space, which costs. Extremely fast and unlimited business class internet that doesn't go down and that really costs.

4. Even with the best attempts, they will download porn on the PC's, get them infected with viruses, be swearing in online games and just be vulgar little ingrates.

5. The tourney idea sounds great in theory. The problem any true hardcore PC gamer is going to play at home, on their system, with their $90 gaming mouse and their tweaked OC'd PC with their clan and has no need for a place like this.

6. With all the PC's and consoles and sweaty turds in there, you need AC and lots of power and commercial power costs big time.

7. In places like Asia or India, etc, big gaming internet cafe's work good, people can't afford systems at home. In North America, kids out there have better cell phones than I do. They have multiple consoles at home. Any serious PC gamer is going to have their own hardcore gaming PC rig setup and customized and tweaked for them and not want to go pay somewhere to use a community PC.

8. You spend half your time switching games all the time for kids as you don't want to give them discs, so you need to keep track of what games are out and in and switch them all the time.

Let's say you live in a normal NA city and want to get a decent sized space, maybe $1500 a month, probably more for commercial space in a commercial district. $500 a month for decent net. $500 a month for hydro, water. Say you have two staff, yourself and someone else that you pay $10/hour to start with for basic wages, probably 7 days a week as you want to give weekends the chance to be open and get the out-of-school crowd, 10 hours a day, 70 hours a week. That's $1400 a week, $5600 in wages a month. Advertising, phone line, web hosting, other misc expenses, lets say $400 a month. That's $7500 a month to run. You have lets say 10 pc's and 20 consoles. That's $20,000 in equipment you have to pay of or recoop your money on and that's without any games.

So 30 systems rented at an average of say 3 hours per day for all 30 systems, is 90 rented hours per day, times $3 an hour, $270 a day, times 30 days is $8100, basically just breaking even. Putting the extra $600 a month ($8100-7500) toward the $20,000 in equipment and say minimum $5000 in game, so $25,000 initial investment, is 41 months or almost 4 years before the systems are paid off. That doesn't including buying new games all the time, replacing broken systems and equipment, compensation for stealing, etc.

Sounds great in theory, everyone wants to run a game store. Twice, I've tried in different cities and given up as it's not financially viable.

Should have started with all the stuff in your last post, I wouldn't have bothered trying to figure out any numbers or been so long winded about it. lol. Be interesting to see the disc changer system.

What about karaoke bars xD