Looking to open a Gaming Cafe and would like some insight

[ItsWhoIAm]

Hey guys! 

I am pretty new to the whole LTT forum but I have been following him on YouTube and what not. I am a big fan of PC building and would like to take my interest into the professional field with me. I am a Mathematics major with a minor in Spanish (not that that matters).

 

I am really interested in opening a Gaming Cafe around my area and am thinking about a 10 PC setup to start off. These would all be built by me to save on those prebuilts. I'm thinking a standard setup of a Ryzen 2600 with an RX 580 8GB and 16GBs of RAM, I wouldn't crush it on storage but I figured a modest 512GB SSD per PC is fair (probably expand if the business grows)? There is nothing like this in my area and E-Sports are growing rapidly around here. 

Are the PC builds overkill? underkill? middlekill?

 

That is pretty much the setup I run right now and it seems comfortable for a majority of games. 

 

I guess I am looking for insight, like internet speeds, is having over 10 PCs on a single server functional? Just looking for some guidance here and some input.

 

My investments right now seem to be:

Renting a space

Internet

10 PC builds

A Cafe setup

Power

Decor

 

Thanks for your help guys I will keep in touch on this post!

[knightslugger]

I think before you start getting ahead of yourself with the simple things, like space, decor, and computers... I think you really need to sit down with a business partner who majored in business and someone who works in high level IT infrastructure. These computers are going to need security to protect against abuse and data breaches.

[mariushm]

The hardware configurations seem sound.

Not sure how profitable it would be to have just gaming.

 

You should look into also having some room to use your location as birthday celebration events ... for example family rents the place for an afternoon for the birthday girl/boy and friends, so have room for a bigger table, some couches..

 

May want to have a separate room or some separation between the gaming area (where kids may play and be noisy, talk between each others, loud, shouting etc) and a smaller area for parents to have a coffee or tea, and use free wifi to check their emails , maybe some people would want to come and work on something for an hour or have a meeting with someone for 20-30 minutes and order something... you don't want these clients to be put off by kids shouting and so on in the gaming area.

 

You could have free Wifi with limits set to something reasonable like 10 mbps or less for free (still can watch youtube and browse sites), or they could get the daily password for high speed wifi with any order (printed on receipt or by giving them a card)

 

Depending on your internet connection you'll have, you may want to set up a server that would cache Steam (and Origin and others) downloads, so that when a user wants to play a specific game, he just hits download and the files get served from your server instead of Steam.

You could also have a 8-10 TB hard drive or several hard drives on the server, and then set up a 1-2 TB network share on each computer for extra storage.

 

Oh, something more to think about ... if you use a smaller SSD for OS and something else for main storage, you could also create hdd images of each computer, so at the end of the day or after a user is done, you could boot from a usb stick and erase the boot drive and image it again from the server with a fresh windows install. This way if a user installs some viruses or does something bad, you can reset the computer within a few minutes (~10s per GB with a 1 gbps connection)

 

 

[Arika]

The first thing you need to research before spending ANY money or planning anything you have listed, is will you have a market for such a thing? it's all well and good to open it, but if you don't have customers you wont be open for long.

 

people these days will likely already have their own PC if they are into PC gaming. what incentives will people have to go to a computer cafe to use yours? how much are people going to be willing to pay?

[pas008]

these seem to be tough to do

you need to supplement it with other things too, only one left in my area does board games and console tourneys too

my 2 cents

 

edit along with some retail/service like gaming collectibles, food, etc

[danomicar]

The PC builds should be of very little concern since they will be a minor fraction of your start up costs here. I'd imagine you'll need to take care of things like getting a license to operate this sort of business, inspection from the fire marshal, and business insurance. Find a good CPA or small business consultant in your area to discuss to viability of something like this before putting out a dime.

[Ja Krispie]

You will also need other costs too, like insurance in case someone gets hurt, licenses, staffing, LLC costs unless you want to risk your personal assets.

 

Just to name a few things

[Teddy07]

Where are you from?

I would be very cautious about opening a gaming cafe in western countries. 

[UncleJarvis]

5 hours ago, Arika S said:

The first thing you need to research before spending ANY money or planning anything you have listed, is will you have a market for such a thing? it's all well and good to open it, but if you don't have customers you wont be open for long.

 

people these days will likely already have their own PC if they are into PC gaming. what incentives will people have to go to a computer cafe to use yours? how much are people going to be willing to pay?

Something like this opened up aver 10 tears ago in a town near me. Never mind it is the fastest growing city in my state, it was still surrounded by rural/farm land. Not many kids had a way to get to the cafe, probably on weekends with a dropoff from parents. I think it lasted only one year.

[Andreas Lilja]

16 hours ago, Teddy07 said:

Where are you from?

I would be very cautious about opening a gaming cafe in western countries. 

Pretty much this.