There was one of these in the centre of my city. They charged ?3 to join and then ?3 an hour. When you joined you got an account on their system and when you boguht time on the computers it stored up (so you could buy and hour and then play half and hour on one day and the other half hour the next). There was a warning when you only had 5 minutes left. All the servers were hosted on a big server behind the counter, if you wanted a server for a game set up you went and asked the owner. They served some food (mostly cans of drink, chocolate bars and sandwichs, but if you asked them they would order a pizza or chinese for you). They had about 20 PCs, at weekends they were always packed, 20*?3=60 an hour, so they must have made quite a bit of money (especially with food sales since most of the staff they had were paid in gaming hours as well as cash
). They also sent a monthly e-mail to all their members with detail about news and events (like when they were holding an all-nighter). Oh, and there were deals you could get, like you could pay ?10 and play for the whole morning (4-5 hours). It was great, a few of my friends and I even had our birthday parties there (they did special deals for them too).
A couple of years ago it mysteriously shut down, I'm not sure what happened to it, but I don't think it went bankrupt (then again, the loan repayments must have been pretty steep after buying 20 PCs). A fancy wine bar now occupies its space.
Anyway, I hope that I get too rambling in that first paragraph, they were just all of the things that made it great, and I hope that last bit didn't dishearten you as it's a great idea and I hope you succeed and prosper
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