6 mistakes to avoid before opening your own gaming café

I don’t know if it’s the same in other countries, but in the Philippines, most people think that running a cybercafé means big profit. While this could be true, it’s not something that will happen if you buy computers, have people rent it and just let it be. After running a gaming café for two years and being a customer for years prior to that, I can tell you that it’s no walk in the park.

But first things first: What do I mean by gaming cafe? Basically, it’s a cybercafe that caters mostly to gamers. Sure you can entertain those who are there for casual surfing or chatting and whatnot, but at the end of the day, you are there to cater to gamers. Keeping that in mind will help you figure out the direction your cybercafe is going for. For example, it will make more sense to have your games patched and updated instead of having the latest photo editing software.

Now before you go ahead and hastily put up your own computer café, I’d like you to take a look at the six most common mistakes you would want to avoid if you’re planning to open a gaming cafe. Take note that this is for people who seriously want a gaming cafe with quality in mind.

1. Impulsively setting up a legion of computer units

Since this is an internet café, of course you will be having multiple computers —ideally ten units minimum and grow from there if you’re short on budget. Sure having a lot of computers is very advantageous. You can accommodate a lot of customers especially those that like to play in groups and you can also host tournaments. If you have the time, money and workforce to do this then go ahead and do it, but if you are putting fifty units on the floor and are going to let them take care of themselves, please rethink this.

The idea here is that if you can’t afford 20 units, don’t get it. And even if you can afford it financially, consider how many you can afford to maintain and look after. These things need regular maintenance and peripheral replacements and you will be surprised how quickly keyboards or mice break. By experience, I started with ten units. There are daily maintenance tasks before the shop opens and closes like patching the games or clearing the cache. There are also monthly tasks like disk defragmentation or physical cleaning of the interior of the system unit. There are also irregular tasks like installation of new games.

Having a cybercafe with multiple units is very awesome indeed especially during the first few weeks. But in the long run, if you don’t have a maintenance plan, some units will get neglected and end up being so slow or sometimes unusable. Let me tell you that this is a waste of money.

2. Investing on units with horrible specifications because they’re affordable

While canvassing for a place to buy our units from, we came across one shop who was telling us that we could run a maxed out StarCraft 2 on an on-board 512MB gfx card with a Pentium 4 processor. Now if you encounter something like that, turn around, walk away and do not look back. No matter how affordable it is, it’s not going to be worth it.

I’m not saying you have to get SteelSeries on your units (but if you can afford it then why not?), but at least get something with good quality. So why should you turn away from affordable low-end specs? First, it’s not going to be enough to play most games decently today. It’s going to lag plus the graphics are going to be crappy. Second, upgrading that means buying a new computer. And, yes, upgrades are necessary unless you’re looking at your cybercafe as a short-term business or unless you’re not considering improvements.