Working up a business plan for a gaming cafe / esports bar. Part of the location consideration is an active player base for several of the most popular online games. TBH I only play League, so I'm starting here. Is there a way to get numbers of players by city/region?
Arrohe1 votesI would contact riot directly for that kind of information, that kind of data is probably not public. But going off of my knowledge base I would say any city with 2 or more universities would be a good idea, preferable in close contact to each other. I would probably avoid New York, mostly due to your overhead being too high. TBH gaming bars are doing pretty well in most areas as it is (at least the one in Vancouver i know of is doing well), so you could probably open one and do well, regardless of league activity, as long as you ensured you had the other major games available (hearthstone, CSGO, blah blah blah).
roòk1 votesHey sorry for the late reply. Your advice about location is exactly along the lines of my thinking. Major cities are probably out because of land prices and prices in general. But it still needs to be a large urban area. Also, colleges are home to a) concentrated target demo and b) esports clubs (and now scholarships too!). So yeah a college town that's not also a major town is the target. We have a few ideas, but I'm very open to suggestions as well.
Arrohe1 votesyou might have one trouble if you go for too small a college town, over breaks your sales would suffer. While your school year sales might be able to float you I would suggest a medium sized city aka ~500.000 - 1.5 mil population. just a small thing to think about.
Ale non è male1 votesThe better chance you have is to pick some middle size city that is not too far from other big city/states so that you can attract those players when you organize some kind of event. Something around the the Great Lake Zone or the North East could be the better options for that, probably (but I do not know American geography so well except for city with sports team in NBA/NFL, tbh)