Cybercafés: The new breed
The traditional cybercafé has been around for years, however with the growing popularity of e-sports there are some young pretenders looking to capitalise on its success.
Fraggers is a gaming café (currently no alcohol license) in Altrincham, South Manchester. What is clear about Fraggers upon entering is that this is a place you go to in order to game. It is split over three floors with 25 PCs, four console stations, three large TVs and a projector. These systems offer a huge range of games from Counter-Strike to Guitar Hero. You name it, they have it.
Fraggers charges customers per hour to use these systems and this is its primary revenue stream. It has a range of soft drinks as well as a food menu to provide sustenance for gaming sessions that can potentially last several hours. At weekends it offers a lock-in with gamers often found to still be going until the wee hours. The Fraggers model is to attract gaming enthusiasts from the local area and so to build up a friendly, loyal community.
Fraggers, in Altrincham, Manchester
Meltdown is a gaming bar situated on Caledonian Road, not far from Kings Cross Station in London. The Meltdown set up allows it to potentially cater to a broader audience than Fraggers. With just two PCs and an Xbox 360 in the corner it is not necessarily somewhere you can rock up to and expect to be able to play at immediately. Meltdown does allow customers to hook up their own laptops however it simply doesn’t have the volume of hardware compared to Fraggers. It is more like a conventional pub. With screens around the bar showing Twitch feeds it can be thought of as more an e-sports bar than a conventional LAN café. It’s promoted as somewhere people can go and have a drink with friends and spectate competitions as well as play themselves. There is no food available however Meltdown do allow customers to bring in their own food and eat it there. The Meltdown model relies on customers spending money on drinks for its primary source of income.
Meltdown, at King's Cross, London
The main focus of Meltdown and Fraggers is on the Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) genre, in particular League of Legends (LoL) and Defence of the Ancients 2 (DOTA2), although StarCraft2 (SC2) features prominently too. This has clearly been identified as the core market the new breed of cybercafés wish to attract in order to succeed and, given their popularity and the audiences they draw worldwide, it’s not hard to see why. In both Meltdown and Fraggers these are the games you will see most people playing and the ones being shown on the big screens. These games, however, are not for everyone (including myself). The MOBA titles in particular have a community with a reputation for hostility towards new players, which is not ideal for a business looking to build itself around the community concept.
So how do Meltdown and Fraggers hope to increase their customer base?
Well, one idea both establishments have hit upon is to offer workshops for new LoL and DoTA2 players. These workshops allow new players to learn the basics in a friendly environment, hopefully helping them to improve and so to keep returning. They also put on tournaments for games outside the e-sport umbrella, which is what drew me to Meltdown. The evening I attended had a retro-Nintendo theme, with tournaments for Bomberman on the SNES, Mario Kart 64 and Super Smash Brothers Melee throughout the night. It was well organised by an enthusiastic host (dressed as Nick Fury) with little to no delay between rounds. Most importantly it drew a large crowd with plenty of people getting their cosplay on. It had a brilliant atmosphere with a load of people brought together through a mutual interest in gaming: A little different to my usual evening at the pub but very entertaining and something I would absolutely go to again.
Fraggers also puts on tournaments, however its location in a town in South Manchester means it can’t draw on the same scale of potential customers available to Meltdown. This is likely to be the biggest challenge it faces.
Both establishments also allow customers to book their venues for private events. This could potentially make for an incredibly important source of revenue as it guarantees people through the doors and spending money.
For both Meltdown and Fraggers marketing will be the key to success. Both currently rely mainly on word of mouth with little web presence outside of Facebook. A decent website is the very least an establishment based around gaming should be aiming for. For me, the best way to get people down to their venues is the one-off tournaments and private events. It gets people down as groups which people may find less intimidating and, assuming they have good times, should hopefully lead to them returning or at the very least increasing awareness by word of mouth.
Ultimately, creating a successful gaming bar/café is a huge challenge. A very competitive environment in which the USP for your business is an activity traditionally done, for free, at home is not easy. The rise in popularity and accessibility for competitive multiplay gaming, particularly in so called e-sports, is the niche these business hope to establish themselves with. Whether they will succeed or not remains to be seen, but I wish them the best of luck.
