So in an earlier post I mentioned that my friends and I are opening a gaming center at the start of fall. So far everything is going great. We've received the proper loans and are about to purchase the property. We're going to start renovating very soon. Though this site is mainly aimed at the U.K. region, I thought I would post this anyway. So we have 2,800ft2 to work with, and this building is huge believe me. It also happens to be located right next to Buffalo Wild Wings and a few shopping centers. We've spoken to Nvidia about a possible partnership and they have been great so far. They are going to offer to help us out, provided we advertise them enough, and load all the rigs with Nvidia, which we were planning on doing anyways. The upper hand that we have here, is that all of use used to work for another game cafe not to far away. Due to very poor management, we've all gone sour towards the owner. As a result, he's screwed over a lot of good people who have just been trying to help him, and has lost a HUGE customer base. We know what NOT to do. We will have everything. Xbox 360, PS3, Wii. We even have a seperate room for tabletop games, Magic, Warhammer, etc. We will have 12 PC's, all very fast top of the line We plan on hosting LAN's ever Friday night, and offering up membership deals and so on. We hope to host large LANs at some point. Sponsored ones, with prizes and advertisement. Here's a little concept render that we will be shooting for. Wish us luck!
But But Wii uses AMD graphic ship.... Also, I like how the PC you have super confy chair, and you put 2 wooden chair for your Mac, which I imagine they are registration kiosk or Internet only systems. Congrads on everything, I wish you the best of success!
Well those chairs are for the mac users to sit higher up and type up their novels whilst sipping Star Bucks...
I don't think you're using enough of that space. Perhaps you could try getting a few more PCs and putting them in the bottom right of the picture/render.
Yeah, you could cram a fair bit more in there. Also: SECURITY! Not only do you need some mild on-computer security, but get some serious security to stop people pikeying all that valuable hardware. Better safe and slightly poorer than sorry and alot poorer
Well you have locks that you put on cases. There are also alarms that rings if you pull the computer (great for screens), and you have the standard retail store alarm used. It seams that the monitor you are going to get will be Dell's. If your final decision is that, I suggest to order form Dell Buisness (for a better service, price should be the same), and order over the phone as you negotiate the price. I say this because that is what I was able to do when ordering my Dell laptop over the buisness... and I just order 1, and got a serious deal.
Ah man, this looks wicked! It's always been one of my backup/retirement plans to open a LAN centre and it's brilliant that there are people out there actually doing it Seriously, keep us informed - very interested to see how this pans out.
Just make sure any seating (except for the Macs) is comfortable enough to use for hours on end. The longer they sit, the more they pay As for the Macs, just buy something with the word "organic" in it and there will be a line out the door.
I tried out a number of "Gaming cafes" when I spent three months in Australia and didn't have access to other gaming PCs. Some things I'd consider: - Make sure the keyboard/mice aren't filthy - How are you going to make sure the cd-keys don't get stolen? In most places I tried, I couldn't play online and it really sucked - What's the line with beverages going to be? People like to drink energy drinks and stuff while playing, if I were to go into such place, I would like to buy it there, but not get robbed... - Speakers? It's crazy annoying to listen to other peoples sounds... Clearly I wouldn't have any idea of how to manage such a place, but you can't go wrong with normal OS without any bizarre launcher/timer programs running full screen all the time. In the OZ none of the places I tried felt like I would want to come back to the same place...
Should not be too difficult. Maybe at the end of the day clean them. Always have extra systems in the back in the case one comes down, same for screen and peripheral. Simple, they want to play, they come to the desk get a disk, write their name on the computer with the computers they would be using, and if they don't return them, then you charged them. or have ISO's on the system, pre-loaded. At worst you can have every game disk loaded from a server on the back but that could be expensive and slower (network).
I believe one can (and probably should) get a specific licence for gaming centres which work differently from a normal end user licence. Steam seems to i'm not sure about other providers.
I never had to ask for disks in any of the places, it's the serials that people are after, not the actual media. Dunno if one can find the pre-set serial in some games from the menu/from some config file and just write it down, effectively stealing the game....
So then it's simple.. you make it harder for them the serial. You found where the serial is placed on every game, have it encrypted with a tool, and you run a launcher which decrypt the serial number (file or registry) and then launches the game the person wants to start. You can do this in a few minutes with Flash and a third party software to make the Flash project a standalone application. I can do it right now in a few minutes, just give me a path and the location of the game executable and the app is yours. Note; It's easy because the encryption system is already done and provided by most third party application maker for Flash.
We already know how to handle all those issues. We did all work at a game cafe before. Users won't need to grab a CD. We use log in based software that prevents the user from doing anything but launching apps that we put in the software. The only way the user can get anywhere near a standard windows desktop is if they know the Admin account information.
