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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tav_Behemoth" data-source="post: 4751229" data-attributes="member: 18017">Good post, aboyd. In Korea there are game cafes that work on this model. My hosts took me to one in a mall in Seoul. It's kind of like a Starbucks, except that the walls are lined with shelves of games. You order drinks from a menu, buy table time (about the price of a fancy coffee for one hour IIRC), and then request games (also listed on the menu, with descriptions of their playing time, complexity, age range, etc.) The staff will then bring you the game, and if you don't know how to play they teach you.Part of why this works is that boardgames are a new thing in Korea - Eurogames started the game cafe mania, but even games like Life are a novelty there. Another reason is that most Koreans live under the same roof as other members of their family; renting table space at a cafe is a nice way to get out of the house & have a place to play with your friends. Both of these factors are less true in the US, although the not having a basement that can be dedicated to gaming is certainly something most folks in NYC and Seoul share.Some things to add to this idea:- RPGs aren't popular enough in Korea to make it work, but I think they'd be a great fit for a game cafe here. One of the problems that a cafe owner told me about was that he basically spends most of his store's expenses on personnel salaries teaching people to become gamers, and once they do so those gamers are ready to go buy games at a discount on the Internet and play them on their own; just having the table space isn't enough to keep them coming back to the cafe. An ongoing RPG campaign is a great return-business generator, and if you do living-campaign stuff (like having different groups exploring & changing the world all together) it could offer exciting advantages over playing a RPG at home that wouldn't depend on you needing to convince existing gamers that your GMing is superior to what they can do for themselves.- Nevertheless, the Seoul model implies that you should be available to run as many different kinds of games as the store carries. Part of what you offer the store could be the fact that you're a member of every game company's demo program, like the Looney Labs team or Steve Jackson's MIB, and you bust your butt getting those companies to support gaming at the store. You might also be able to get some support (financial or barter) from those companies.- To get your foot in the door, you might offer to work on commission for the game store - they don't have to pay you out of their budget, but if you create $200 of sales in an afternoon they ought to be willing to give you $20 or $40 of that. Again, you're not going to be able to make a living this way, but it'd build up your experience, demonstrate the possibilities to the game store, and be a fun way to spend a weekend.</blockquote>

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