Opening a (simplified) Cyber Cafe/Gaming Lounge

Networking
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I’m just about ready to quit my job and do something like open up a little business that makes enough to pay my mortgage and bills for the moment, nothing too elaborate.

Even if I do not follow through with it, I’m trying to get some hardcore research done while the passion is still here.

I’m mainly trying to keep things simple and work out the basics.

So, let’s just say I wanted to have 10 terminals including my own and all I wanted to do for starters was specialise in World of Tanks. A place where people who have a common interest can chill out, pool ideas, share tips and have a silky-smooth gaming experience with fellow addicts.

What I know is that WoT is not extremely demanding regarding system specs, that single-threaded performance is a priority and that Windows 10 would be the best operating system to run it on.

I’d assume that each ‘terminal’ should have its own GPU.

I’d like to stick with AMD everything ideally.

What I don’t know is whether to just have 10 separate PCs just connected to one network, or have a server and 9 or 10 clients.

I basically know nothing about the latter, but it is something that I’m interested in learning and I get the impression that Wendell has a passion for it, which I can relate to. There’s something exciting about it and AMD and motherboard producers are fanning that flame.

Apart from that basic hardware side of things, I also haven’t had much luck with finding out how to go about the Windows licence and which ‘package’ to go with. I ended up getting to a page where I could see the Terms of Use after selecting the software however there are three options that could possibly fit the bill, going by the names alone:

Windows Desktop Operating System
Windows MultiPoint Server
Windows Server

Yes I’m a relative noob, so be gentle please.

At the moment I’m not after business advice and I know that if I wanted to maximize earnings, I would focus on a multi-platform, latest and greatest set up. I’m definitely not opposed to the latter, by the way, but I’m a little too depleted of mental and other resources to think too big, currently.

This is probably why I want to open up a business in which I can play tanks all day.

Please feel free to move this to the most appropriate forum section.

I tried searching the forums for what I’m after but didn’t quite find it.

Thank you for your assistance and advice in advance/anticipation.

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Ok, let’s start with some “easy” stuff.

  • World of Tanks isn’t supported to well on Linux, so Windows it is.
  • For the Gaming machines, i’d just go with a plain windows 10 License. Running a Server will make things more complicated and setting up a “1 Server 10 Gamers” kind of deal isn’t really easy.
  • Decide if you want to deal with the machines and their hardware. You can build the by yourself, or you can get some prebuilts from another vendor. The first will save you some money, but when building and maintaining 10 Machines that run 12 hours a day with varying people on it, you’re bound to have to deal with failure.
    Having a vendor that delivers the machines and maybe has a support contract for them might be a good idea.
  • Put some thought into how you want to “Secure” the machines. When you let random people use your hardware and internet connection, you want to make sure that they can’t do anything really bad.
    Either Lock down the session to only start the Games you want, or/and look into software that resets the PC to a known good state at reboot. The last thing you want is some scriptkiddy coming in and throwing a crypto miner or such into your network. This could mean days or weeks not being able to provide Service.

So, my personal idea would be something like this:

  • 10 mid-range PC’s, pre-built from msi or corsair or such. with 24" 1080p 144Hz Monitors and some entry-level Peripherals (Logitech mice and some cheap-ish mechanical keyboards). I’d put a 4TB Spinning drive in them for extensive steam librarys or such. Games get big nowadays.
  • 1 Server (nothing fancy) that pulls some NAS duty, setup a steamcache server and can take care of any software that monitors times for billing users and such.
  • The Server can be Windows or Linux. Windows could have some benefits in terms of setting up an AD and Users, which would let you manage GPO’s on your clients and such, so much better centralized management. Windows Server get’s expensive fast though and it’s maybe a little over the top to run a domain for what you want to do.
  • All Windows Users are non-admin users. All PC’s reset to a state you know is good after reboot. Every client starts the PC from off (booting with SSD’s is fast) and shuts the PC down after usage. That way, all of what they did get’s wiped. Take a look if you need more strict management of what users can do.
  • Also think about physically securing your hardware. Either by putting kensigton locks on it or by not allowing backpacks and such and looking for people that steal stuff.

There’s probably a 1000 times more stuff to think about, but that’s from the top of my head, some things i’d look into.

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You sure there is a market for a place like that in your area?

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If the business is fluid enough to pay a mortgage and bills, and be self sustaining, I don’t think you will get to play much.
Especially with 10 clients.
You might have to be doing a lot of upselling to make the margin you need, as well as trying to advertise the business in the first couple of years…

I would recommend that instead you suddenly become really good and play professionally for money if you want to be paid to play. [edit yodel to upsell]

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Yeah, this might be a problem. To put some hypothetical numbers to this:

  • Lets say you want to have 2k $ at the end of the month to pay for rent and food and such
  • A space for 10 Gaming stations plus some of what you’d need in a decent area would probably run you 2-3k $ (really rough estimation. Depends highly on country/area etc. But commercial space isn’t cheap)
  • Electricity, Water, and other stuff can easily be another 500-1k a month
  • Hardware needs to be replace ever 3-5 years. 10 Rigs that are 1.5k each (including peripherals) would be another 500 a month.

So, to make 2k in your pocket, you’d be have to make around 6-8k a month from customers. With 5 day weeks you’d have to make 40 bucks a day from each station. So, if you plan on doing 10 hour days, that’s 4$ an hour for your customers. And that’s if you have 100% usage of your place.

So, realistically, if you can make it to 75% usage (which would be really high) and get a second employee to get to 12 hours open, you’d have to charge around 5-10 bucks per hour on one of your PC’s. That’s quite steep…

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Or go the cinema route, and offer concessions for a high price.
Gamerz Luv Mountain Dew and Dorritos…

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One gaming cafe where I grew up even served alcohol, but stopped serving at like 20:00 so people didn’t get too bad.

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Concessions will be the money maker

You’ll need to first work on your concessions before you start, you need things that taste good but are also cheap to buy in bulk and make enough margin to be worth it but are still affordable to the customer

Consider a member system that gets you redeemable points

Having too much variety can be bad, that’s why most godfather’s pizza doesn’t offer pineapple

Mountain dew is the most obvious thing to keep stock of, consider a small stock of surge, ask you customers and regulars what they want

Plain coffee won’t cut it, it’s gotta taste good, so prepare to look up recipes on YouTube

You also need to keep sanitation wipes in stock, people ARE gross and you will need to wipe down keyboards and mice everytime

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I guess people also trash stuff that isn;t theirs, so keyboards and mice will break a lot quicker than at home.

Ah, whoops, sorry bud

depending on how you run it, I think each would need a GPU for anything higher than Dota / League

You might be okay with iGPU in Korea or somewhere that plays such games a lot? (I don’t know the local market)

Windows server / desktop I’m not sure about, but you probably want to google some sort of active protal / session management, as you will want guest sessions, and restricted / whitelisted to stuff you know is safe / legal.

I use Linux, and am sure such tools would be available with Linux / BSD, but you will find it easier to purchase some time share software for Windows, I know they exist

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I would recommend a PC with minimal hardware, just decent CPU and GPU and use a NAS for game storage. You need to learn as much as you can about Active Directory and group policies for locking down PCs.

The computers whether you like it or not will be used for illegal activity at some point and you need to do a good bit to make that not easy. Such as not allowing people to download something unless authorized by request.

I would also look into the 1 thin client per station route but look with GPU passthrough to VMs with Vmare/ESXi.

Really though your biggest challenge is going to be locking down the machines from bored neckbeards with rubber duckys and USB Kill sticks

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Might hide the computers from the customers? Like, leaving just the cables out. Might even make it as part of the furniture…

Depending on the performance needed and target audience you might go for an APU, like 2200G, 3200G or even 3400G. Guess it would be cheaper and easier to maintain than some kind of server.

And I think mechanichal keyboards would break fairly often, so logitech cheap stuff would be plausible.

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I meant more along the lines of being prepared for somebody to come in and try downloading CP or buying drugs online. Just have some tracking and protection in place. Show that you were at least trying to block access to illegal things. Or else prepare for 3 letter black suits to shut your business down.

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also that

I was reffering to kill sticks

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For the systems this is what i would do

Windows server setup with active directory, so a user can sign up online get an account when then come in to the space than can login to a open system

There is software out there can you can use to reimage systems very quickly. So when someone is done playing and logs off, the system is reimaged so any sites that the previous user logged or files that were saved and cleared of the system ready for the next person to use

Linux server running a caching server for the most used game providers like Steam, Origin, Uplay, Epic

Pfsense router, so all the dns forwarding can be done easily and efficiently on the router

10GBe networking is a must, cause nobody wants to wait forever for a game to get copied over the network and that some games are huge in size(new call of duty is 175GBs WTF) So having 10GBe with really fast storage on the caching makes it a more enjoyable experience cause your not spending all of your time waiting on a game to download or come from the caching server

Anyways, its a good idea, there is places that offer this but there mainly in korea and china

Good luck

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Faronics Deep Freeze comes to mind.

Is anyone else thinking about thin provisioned iscsi with block level dedup. Using a few 8T nvme u.2 drives on a nas with a pair of cheap 40Gbps links going into a cheap 40/10 switch. I don’t think there’s another solution for lots and lots similar content across many machines.

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As i said, one 4TB HDD per PC should be plenty for most AAA Games plus the obvious E-Sports titles.
Set up a Steam Cache Server and you can download to all stations at gigabit speed. If you need it faster, you could even make a “copy station” with a sata dock, where you copy the steam library over. Luckily that’s possible. If set up once, making a new machine from scratch should be done in a couple of hours. And most of that time wouldn’t be active work.

Neither 8TB NVME Drives nor any 40Gbps gear is exactly cheap. It needs to safe you a LOT of time to make the investment worth it. And this really depends on how often you reinstall the stuff and what you plan to have on them. If, like OP hinted, WoT is the only game he plans on selling, i doubt this setup would be worth it…

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Switch: CRS326-24S+2Q+RM is about 500
8TB drives are about a $1000 a pop

But yes it’d be a major PITA to manage, and it would likely barely break even for only 10 machines.
If 4T is enough then putting storage on each machine is not a big part of the cost anymore (I was thinking the project needed ~20T per machine / $10k overall).
Simple gigabit network and regular size ssd in each machine is probably good enough in that case.

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That’d be really much.
Even AAA Games rarely break 100G. Some are above that, but most are below. Things like CS:GO or Overwatch or LoL are well below that. 4TB would probably be enough for all the common esports titles plus 20 or so AAA Titles. Should be good for almost anything you could want.
I also don’t think that you’d need to offer every game in the steam store. Having a good selection of the 10 most common online games and top 10-15 AAA Games shoudl have you covered for 99,99% of people.

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If I was looking to open a business like this, I’d find a few that have been running successfully for a few years and talk to the owners about what you’re trying to do. They will be a wealth of information and it will be worth every second that you talk to them.

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You mean like…

Hi, I wanna compete with you!
Tell me everything you know! :smiley::+1:

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