Should You or Shouldn’t You?

The question of whether or not a store should have a game room is highly contentious. Fortunately, both camps are on good terms and no one is likely to persecute you for your decision. In fact, you might develop a serious case of “green grass syndrome” at some point during your store ownership as you consider all of the pros and cons of each side.

Advantages

Adding game space has one primary advantage and several corollaries descending from that advantage. The advantage is marketing opportunities. It does no good, however, if you don’t actively take advantage of it. That’s another article, though, so on with the advantages.

Branding

The game room allows you to present your store as the place to play games, not just the place to buy games. You can use this to shape the image you present to your local market. Market your store as a social gathering place to encourage people to visit and increase the time they spend there.

Competitive Edge

If you’re the only store in your market with a game room, you have a competitive edge against the other store. If you have the largest game room, you have an edge. If you have the best tables, the coolest design, or the most people showing up for your tournaments, each of these is a reason for players to go to your store instead of the competition.

Manufacturer Opportunities

Some manufacturers require a game room for opening a direct account, or for other preferential treatment. Having a game room can entitle you to better discounts on certain product, better availability, or certain direct-to-retailer incentives.

Organized Play

You can leverage the game space to host game leagues and tournaments. Offer prizes from your own inventory or take advantage of game manufacturer-sponsored events. These events often bring new players to your store, increase the amount these players spend, and encourage players to visit more often. Each of these factors increases sales.

Regular events can create very large sales increases, especially if the owner is involved. The owner’s personal interest is a weighty endorsement. Regular play encourages new purchases. Combine the two and you might see sales of a single product line increase by $1,000 a week.

Disadvantages

The disadvantages are numerous and range from problem behaviors to purely financial reasons. They range from minor to serious in their value, and individual store owners apply different weight to each of these issues. If you plan to have a game room regardless of these problems, you should be prepared to handle them before you open.

Pollution of the Player Pool

Once gamers start getting together, they share information. Some of that information is good. One Warhammer 40k player shows up for the game with his army laid out in Army Builder format, and his opponent compares the nice clean printout with his scribbles on spiral-bound notebook paper. Before the day is over, you’ve sold yet another copy of Army Builder.

Some of that information-sharing is bad. The CCG crowd is particularly notorious for this—they share the concept of buying their cards from online discounters, and your box sales begin to decrease with each new set. Some players advise others to download books from file-sharing sites instead of buying them from your shelf 12 feet away. Players from a competitor’s store might encourage the new players you created at great investment of time to go play elsewhere.

Gamers might also get together to form a club. It sounds exciting and fun, but the club’s first organized action is often asking for a discount. They feel if there’s no benefit to joining the club, that nobody will join. Do you give the discount and reduce how much money your biggest spenders spend, or do you risk alienating the club members?

Mess

Drinks, food, loose cards, CCG wrappers, miniature sprues, spilled paint, glue—if you sell it intact in your store, you can probably find pieces of it in your game room at the end of the day. Over the course of the day, cleaning up after this mess or hounding the gamers to do it themselves can take a heavy investment in your time (or the time of the people you’re paying an hourly wage).

Theft

You know people will steal from you at some point during your career. You might not have thought that they would steal from each other. Do you kick somebody out when you suspect he’s stealing? What if you’re wrong? No matter what you do, you’ll lose customers over it.

Similar to theft is the concept of “trade rape.” You know the crowd. These are the competitive players of CCGs (or now CMGs) who trade their commons or uncommons for “money rares” from the new or younger players. I’ve heard a player cheer “I just made $70 off that guy!” moments after the new player left the store. At some point, those players wise up and you have a customer who probably won’t return and might tell his horror story to his friends.

Cheating

If you run tournaments, you’ll encounter a variety of cheating methods that will make you cringe. Players not marking off damage to their ‘mechs in Battletech. The Magic player the others call “Howling Mine” because he keeps drawing extra cards when he thinks he can get away with it. Mis-marked or loaded dice. Marked sleeves. The cheater chases off other players and leaves people with a bad impression of your store.

Liability

How much insurance do you have? Care to find out the hard way? Wait until a player in the game room leans back on a chair and falls, or somebody has a bad problem with a hobby knife, or a fight breaks out over a tournament ruling. If these people were playing at home, the problem might still have happened, but at least you wouldn’t be on the hook for it.

Cost

The game room costs money. You pay rent for your space, and whatever space you devote to your game room costs a certain amount. If you pay a total of $15 per square foot per year (after adding your rent, CAM and any other charges) for your 2,000 square feet, and you devote half of that to your game room, you spend $15,000 so that gamers can have the privilege of playing games in your store.

The game room also has hidden costs. Who’s running those events? If it’s you, then you presumably pay somebody to run the counter. If it’s an employee, you pay his wage. If you’re giving customers a discount, it still costs money. You can get volunteers to run some events, but volunteers can’t do all of it.

Better Alternatives

This thought is the main point of contention with the game room. What else could you do with the $15,000+ it costs to maintain that game room each year? If you think you can make it more productive with an aggressive TV commercial campaign, then you should rent a smaller location and spend that $15,000 in advertising.

A more common approach is to spend that money on inventory to fill that other 1,000 square feet. Another $15,000 in inventory could earn $45,000 in annual sales over and over again without all the hassles that come with the game room. New product lines or deeper stocking of current product lines can earn be as much of a competitive edge as the game room.

This list doesn’t include all the points on either side, but it does represent the major arguments. At least one list has identified about 30 complaints against, for example, most of them falling under the broad category of “unwelcome behavior.” Comments and questions are always welcome in the forum.