PC Gaming Lounge Business

lloose said:
Well... Games Workshop is the company behind Warhammer. You can't compare that kind of thing to a startup gaming lounge. It's like saying "I found this little burger joint called McDonald's. The place was packed. I need to open a fried chicken joint".
Click to expand...

sorry

I had no idea warhammer had achieved such ascendancy in the tabletop space

does anyone play squad leader any more?

Panzergruppe Guderian?

anyone?


le sigh
 
Last edited:
DNR said:
OP are you thinking along the lines of opening something like this? The hardware they are running isn't cheap with 30 Alienware set ups. Seems like they are counting heavily on League of Legends.

http://www.kansascity.com/entertainment/article26049496.html
Click to expand...

That looks similar to what I want to do. Yes I realize it isn't cheap. :)

I'm curious to see what their pricing will be as well as some other things...

Edit: Is their website not updated? On their FB page they have reviews from early this year but their website says it's still under construction and doesn't list prices.

I do like that they have "watch parties." Could be a really cool social places to watch the big tournaments like ESL and League.

Edit 2: I just looked up Alienware prices for shits and giggles. As expected they suck. $1699 gets you an R370 lmao.
 
Last edited:
Thinking about this more I think it would be wise to advertise the business as an E-Sports lounge.

North America is growing by leaps and bounds popularity wise. I've already researched quite a few places that advertise as an E-Sports lounge. Associating the business right out of the gate as one would be more strategic than just solely a LAN Center. Keeping in mind it doesn't cost the customers anything just to be there hanging out. This helps drawn in that crowd for the social experience I am aiming for.

https://www.superdataresearch.com/blog/esports-brief/
 
damstr said:
That looks similar to what I want to do. Yes I realize it isn't cheap. :)

I'm curious to see what their pricing will be as well as some other things...

Edit: Is their website not updated? On their FB page they have reviews from early this year but their website says it's still under construction and doesn't list prices.

I do like that they have "watch parties." Could be a really cool social places to watch the big tournaments like ESL and League.

Edit 2: I just looked up Alienware prices for shits and giggles. As expected they suck. $1699 gets you an R370 lmao.
Click to expand...

Did you call them? Dell can really work deals to win a contract and you should have the volume. They might even throw on site in..

Another thing you might look at is a local boutique computer builder they might be able to give you a good price in exchange for branding on the computers or some exposure.
 
rudy said:
Did you call them? Dell can really work deals to win a contract and you should have the volume. They might even throw on site in..

Another thing you might look at is a local boutique computer builder they might be able to give you a good price in exchange for branding on the computers or some exposure.
Click to expand...

I've dealt with Dell a lot. My work orders tons of Dell PC's and servers every year. Still it would have to be quite a hefty discount for me to consider them.
 
jojo69 said:
sorry

I had no idea warhammer had achieved such ascendancy in the tabletop space

does anyone play squad leader any more?

Panzergruppe Guderian?

anyone?


le sigh
Click to expand...

Games Workshop has been around as a company since 1975. Warhammer achieved it 15 years ago, lol.

They were pretty much the tabletop game for years. They are slowly killing their own games though with rules re-releases and price markups.
This has allowed a few other tabletop games to really push into their space.
 
Last edited:
DyNamiC. said:
Games Workshop has been around as a company since 1975. Warhammer achieved it 15 years ago, lol.

They were pretty much the tabletop game for years. They are slowly killing their own games though with rules re-releases and price markups.
This has allowed a few other tabletop games to really push into their space.
Click to expand...

Not to mention the attempts to copyright "Space Marine" and the rise of 3D printing are also contributing factors to their decline. Plus making certain units "illegal" or "unusable" with current game rules (i.e the Gaunt's Ghosts models and the Tau Gue'vesa to name a few) can't be helping either.

Pity though. I use to love swinging by the Games Workshop in my mall whenever I could when I was young. Too poor to get anything but man the games always looked fun.
 
Dangman said:
Not to mention the attempts to copyright "Space Marine" and the rise of 3D printing are also contributing factors to their decline. Plus making certain units "illegal" or "unusable" with current game rules (i.e the Gaunt's Ghosts models and the Tau Gue'vesa to name a few) can't be helping either.

Pity though. I use to love swinging by the Games Workshop in my mall whenever I could when I was young. Too poor to get anything but man the games always looked fun.
Click to expand...

Yep. Constant shenanigans and not cheeky, fun ones either. 40k has turn into either a vehicle parking lot or a giant deathball too. Not much variation on army themes there.
 
Little update. Fine tuning what software and the hardware I will need.

After doing a lot of research it seems most of these cafes in Asia are all running diskless. Basically it's a normal PC except it has no hard drive. As long as the motherboard support PXE boot it can boot off the network.

In this case I would be using CCBoot alongside SL. I'm a little skeptical on load times but if setup correctly you can have SSD speeds for games and OS booting. There are cafes running up to 240 clients diskless. I would only be running 50 but still. Pretty amazing.

Not purchasing 500GB SSD's for 50 PC's would save me around $8000. Now of course I would have to by a beefy server and managed switch but still would save me a lot of money and will be a LOT more easy to maintain. You keep 1 PC the master PC, it has a regular hard drive in it or SSD whatever you want. You do all your game updates and various other updates on this PC. Restart it and it uploads the image to the CCBoot server. Now you restart all the diskless clients and now they have all the latest updates and patches.

You can also have multiple images for PC's running different hardware. Not something I would be utilizing but still the option is there should you need it.

Now the biggest question in my mind when looking at this is the network bandwidth. Talking to a few other LAN owners running this diskless setup, you want to have 1 NIC per 10 diskless PC's.

I would using a Dell T320 server with the following specs...

Xeon 6 core CPU
32GB of memory
RAID 5 with 3 x 500GB SSD's
6 total 1Gb NIC's

Those Dell's come with a dual LAN on the mobo by default. They also offer a PCI add-on card with quad Giga lan ports for a total of 6 NIC's. I would run 6 in NIC teaming, 5 active and 1 on standby to pick up the slack should any of the other NIC's becomes disconnected or fail.

Essentially I would have up to 625 MB/sec network bandwidth available to all 50 PC's.
 
Ok I just noticed this and wanted to point out that you can lock out the os of any windows machine using group policies that how most corp it works. You will need to budget for IT systems admin which is not cheap, even if you do all the initial work yourself. With the number of them out of work that might make things easier for you. But really you could use thin clients which are a screen with hardware to stream the image from a single server. The wires can go through the wall to a sever in a locked room. So that all the personal data could be locked behind a door that is not on the net. Limits risk right there. As far as clean, just invest in clorax wipes beach pretty much is not hard on plastic keyboards and controllers and should deal with just about any cooties. If it was organic cloth you might have an issue but hard inorganic plastics should not be an issue. You could also use a 30 percent solution of bleach and water, which would be even cheaper. But just go through technet to learn how to use group policy objects and yu should be fine as long as no games require admin rights or you make sure they can not call of the cmd prompt or run line which is basically the same thing. Block net send and you could literately create a limited user account to play games. What you would have to budget for is latest games people want to play with their friends. You also want to budget for pre packaged drinks and no food. Otherwise you end up with getting inspected by the health department as a restaurant and all that goes with it. What you really need is to fine out if their are enough people that would spend time there and how to deal with problem children no matter their age. No gamer wants to deal with screaming kids...

Big thing tech wise. No single point of failure. If you have any single point that can stop your pc from playing games you will find that your idea fails the first time you are offline for an extended period of time due to bad word of mouth and bills crashing due to down time you did not plan for. This means that you end up with at least two severs not one. Also if you are running fifty clients off one server with 100 percent up time, even if you shut it down at night it means that maintenance is not included in when it needs to be up and running. Really five mid range servers with decent video cards in them might work better than one massive transaction server for fifty machines. I would have dell see if they have any machines streaming to fifty clients with the server you are looking at. Not low end machines but fifty workstations.

We have hardware you can not get in Asia due to export restrictions and they have access to cheaper hardware than we do so keep that in mind. Also do not use a SSD for that many writes that is just silly, SSD are not that much faster in the real world use than SAS or even mechanical hard drives. But usually if you are buying that much hardware from a vendor under a support contract you usually get more help figuring out what you need to do. games they may have trouble with but get them to loop something like cinebench or 3dmark and you should be able to figure out what you need. Just do not forget that even using vm ware you still have only so many cpu cycles and gpu cycles to play with. If the games run off the server and only see streamed images on the pc's the safest way the server still has to run x number of copies of the games on the hardware it has.

I will reiterate you really need to remember, no single point of failure. That means if you have parts you want to have copies of those parts in the store and insured. I'm saying this because I would love to see more internet cafes take off. Of course the kind I would like to see would have food and alcohol so that they are aimed at adults instead of kids but I think we need to see the simpler ones work first.

One thing you might due to promote you cafe is run a twitch steam of the cafe interspersed with games you are playing on the system... people might come in just to get on the stream...
 
drakken said:
Ok I just noticed this and wanted to point out that you can lock out the os of any windows machine using group policies that how most corp it works. You will need to budget for IT systems admin which is not cheap, even if you do all the initial work yourself. With the number of them out of work that might make things easier for you. But really you could use thin clients which are a screen with hardware to stream the image from a single server. The wires can go through the wall to a sever in a locked room. So that all the personal data could be locked behind a door that is not on the net. Limits risk right there. As far as clean, just invest in clorax wipes beach pretty much is not hard on plastic keyboards and controllers and should deal with just about any cooties. If it was organic cloth you might have an issue but hard inorganic plastics should not be an issue. You could also use a 30 percent solution of bleach and water, which would be even cheaper. But just go through technet to learn how to use group policy objects and yu should be fine as long as no games require admin rights or you make sure they can not call of the cmd prompt or run line which is basically the same thing. Block net send and you could literately create a limited user account to play games. What you would have to budget for is latest games people want to play with their friends. You also want to budget for pre packaged drinks and no food. Otherwise you end up with getting inspected by the health department as a restaurant and all that goes with it. What you really need is to fine out if their are enough people that would spend time there and how to deal with problem children no matter their age. No gamer wants to deal with screaming kids...

Big thing tech wise. No single point of failure. If you have any single point that can stop your pc from playing games you will find that your idea fails the first time you are offline for an extended period of time due to bad word of mouth and bills crashing due to down time you did not plan for. This means that you end up with at least two severs not one. Also if you are running fifty clients off one server with 100 percent up time, even if you shut it down at night it means that maintenance is not included in when it needs to be up and running. Really five mid range servers with decent video cards in them might work better than one massive transaction server for fifty machines. I would have dell see if they have any machines streaming to fifty clients with the server you are looking at. Not low end machines but fifty workstations.

We have hardware you can not get in Asia due to export restrictions and they have access to cheaper hardware than we do so keep that in mind. Also do not use a SSD for that many writes that is just silly, SSD are not that much faster in the real world use than SAS or even mechanical hard drives. But usually if you are buying that much hardware from a vendor under a support contract you usually get more help figuring out what you need to do. games they may have trouble with but get them to loop something like cinebench or 3dmark and you should be able to figure out what you need. Just do not forget that even using vm ware you still have only so many cpu cycles and gpu cycles to play with. If the games run off the server and only see streamed images on the pc's the safest way the server still has to run x number of copies of the games on the hardware it has.

I will reiterate you really need to remember, no single point of failure. That means if you have parts you want to have copies of those parts in the store and insured. I'm saying this because I would love to see more internet cafes take off. Of course the kind I would like to see would have food and alcohol so that they are aimed at adults instead of kids but I think we need to see the simpler ones work first.

One thing you might due to promote you cafe is run a twitch steam of the cafe interspersed with games you are playing on the system... people might come in just to get on the stream...
Click to expand...
I don't know if you've only read the first post but much has been learned since it.

Basically use SmartLaunch which is the Internet Cafe software and CCBoot.

SmartLaunch launches with Windows instead of the Windows shell so people can't get out of it and do things they shouldn't be doing. It also manages billing, inventory and other things.

CCBoot is what I plan on using for all 50 diskless gaming machines. I've talked to a few LAN owners and they ALL recommend using SSD's for CCBoot.

SL and CCBoot will run off 1 Dell 2012 R2 server with RAID 5 configured.

EDIT: Definitely running at least 2 servers like you said. I will have it setup so the backup servers clones off the main server. Also will need backup switches.
 
Last edited:
i would reconsider the raid 5 config and either go with raid 1 or 1+0 or go with a san

i wouldn't put my business critical service on a raid 5 array. especially in this age with ever increasing disc sizes and i/o operations. your just asking for prolonged downtime.

as for business side of things i would also look into the retro gaming scene and setup some competition friendly retro gaming stations .

and look into way at creating a spectacle with those games like lol and the retro games

having these games displayed on big screens to the general patrons would be a great way to draw in curious potential customers.

and focus on competition related events of all game scenes

ie halo event

csgo event

track mania race offs

steet fighter whatever version is popular event

super mario playoffs


etc etc ,

the scene is alive with competitive gamers just itching for a venue to show off.

focus on that and you may jut pull it off.
 
chaos4u said:
i would reconsider the raid 5 config and either go with raid 1 or 1+0 or go with a san

i wouldn't put my business critical service on a raid 5 array. especially in this age with ever increasing disc sizes and i/o operations. your just asking for prolonged downtime.
Looking into diskless booting I've found out RAID 5 is a bad idea. I will only run RAID 1 on the OS drive and the game drive. Won't need RAID 0 since all the drives on the server will be 850 Pro's.

as for business side of things i would also look into the retro gaming scene and setup some competition friendly retro gaming stations .

and look into way at creating a spectacle with those games like lol and the retro games

having these games displayed on big screens to the general patrons would be a great way to draw in curious potential customers.
The way I have my lounge laid out right now, the first thing customers see when they walk in is big screen TV's. Also will be streaming random games to different TV's around the center.

and focus on competition related events of all game scenes

ie halo event

csgo event

track mania race offs

steet fighter whatever version is popular event

super mario playoffs


etc etc ,

the scene is alive with competitive gamers just itching for a venue to show off.

focus on that and you may jut pull it off.

The competitive scene is definitely there. Local tournaments of League, DOTA 2, Heathstone, CS:GO, CoD, and Halo will be definitely be the draw to my center.

A lot of people like showing off how good they are.
Click to expand...

My responses are in red.

I was thinking of building a server myself but I want to have server grade components plus I would be purchasing the 7 year next business day hardware replacement through Dell as well.
 
stayed in korea for a while. From what I saw, they evolved into charging really cheap / hour to attract customers, like a dollar per hour, and triple/quad the price of snacks/soft drinks to make off a living. No foods allowed from outside. They also had a min-paid worker to wipe keyboards, mob the floor and deliver cheap coffee/ramen. Basically a food cafe that provides PC gaming. Some cafe even tried to become a giant smoking room with PC service (inside smoking is prohibited AFAIK unless its a smoking room) but I think the law banned it.

However these things work really well in Asia because they are weak to trends. Basically everyone plays the selected few games. Lol/dota, some Bliz games, some mmo and one or two fps, and you have easy time managing exactly knowing what to run, and customers come in exactly knowing what to play. It would be much harder in NA or europe where played games are much more diverse, and many 100 hr games are better played at home.
 
Last edited:
Ignite Gaming Lounge in Chicago just added a Google virtual tour and its pretty awesome. I've never been and this gives me a much better idea of layouts that work and just make sense.

https://goo.gl/NvC7YS
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top