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[GamerzXtreme]

Hi All.
I am in the process of working with the SBA (Small Business Association) on coming up with a business plan for my gaming lounge/cafe. I will go into specifics in the next couple of days - but my main concern is about the growing popularity of gaming lounges/cafes in the US. Do a lot of you here visit/go to on a daily, weekly, monthly basis? If some one could point me in the right direction where I might find any kind of articles discussing the growing popularity of gaming cafes.

Thanks In Advance....

 

[SD-Ness]

No, I don't have time really.

Here is an article...
http://www.limejelly.com/archives.shtml

Look for the 6 August, 2001 post...there should be one.

 

[GamerzXtreme]

Zero - Article was not found. Thanks for taking the time to read and reply.

 

[Slo]

One just opened up in my city of about 100k. It's got about 24 PC's and two HDTV's with Xboxen hooked to them. Apparently it's pretty popular, because it's always packed on Saturday nights, but I've only ever bothered to go in once. For one, it's $5/hour. So if I want to play a games for the evening it's going to cost me $20-25. I could almost buy the damn game myself for that price. Also, the hardware/connection isn't even as good as I have at my house. The place *just* opened, and their PCs have 256mb of ram and a nVidia 5700 GPU. My home PC beats the shit out of that. In Battlefield, my best pings were about 150. At home I get more like 50 on some servers.

The only reason I can see going back would be to try out a PC game that I'm not sure I want to buy. I would blow $5 to avoid getting burned on a $50 purchase, but at that price I can't see myself being a regular customer.

 

[dskillzhtown]

I can tell you about 2 lounges open in Houston. One is your typical PC shop. With all kinds of FPS and MMORPGs loaded on the PCs. They have the newest video cards in all the PCs. They have "Lock-ins" every other weekend for all night LAN parties. Their business is mostly at night and on weekends, though they do some business during the day on weekdays because their rates to just use a broadband internet connected PC is alot cheaper the Kinko's and other copy shops.

The other place has gone the entire other route. They are a place with nothing but consoles in them. The X-Boxes and PS2s are hooked up to broadband connections as well. They have tournaments there with prizes. The demographic is alot younger and seems to be a lot more active place than the PC lounge. I am also thinking the inital investment was alot smaller to start this one up due to the difference in price of hardware.