Open a Game Store?

#1 From the sounds of things you guys don't have a lot of retail experiance nevermind PC/gaming retail experiance so here are a few thoughts.

1. The money is not in game/hardware sales, not unless you want to try to handle the 2nd hand market like GameStop does (and thats a difficult can of worms full of its own set of issues) but really in providing services like virus removal, PC tune-up, printing services, internet cafe, etc.

2. Indie games unfortunately sell poorly as box downloads primarily due to the fact that no one has heard of them. So if you really were keen on doing this you will have to put in some huge efforts to market and promote them yourself.

3. Go read Davis Ray Sickmon Jrs story of GamerZone (www.gamerzonecenters.com/, a LAN center that he setup and ran for 5 years before closing its doors. It will probably give you some good insite.

4. Go work for a gaming store, or at least a computer hardware store for about 6 months. Its probably the shittiest job you will ever have and it will make you want to hate computers, but you will get a chance to really experiance the day to day life and see if its for you.

5. If you really want to open a games store, just get a GameStop franchise. Ya these guys are the devil of gaming retail, but its a huge name brand that people recognize and theyre already setup to handle most of what you need.

#2 A friend and I ran a regular game store out of the swap meet and garage for a year before he eventually went on to open an actual storefront with his family.

Two things that we realize were not economically worth it. Video games and Milton Bradley.

The overhead on video games just wasn't worth it. Your profit margin sits on the shelves until it is bought, that is money just sitting there and it wasn't a very large profit. We made alot more money on regular games, RPG's, etc.

And if your curious why no on Milton Bradley, we couldn't not sell it cheaper than Toys R Us. They got such a deal on their prices they could practically sell it cheaper then what we could get it for.

*Seperated paragraphs

#3 Ah, thanks for the info. Neither of us really has retail experience, but we have about 30 years of IT experience between the two of us and probably close to double that in just being 'gamers', so we're pretty comfortable in the gamer/tech arena. Honestly, I don't think either of us are looking to 'get rich' from this. More looking to take a break from IT in something we're both interested in.

While we could probably do it, we're really not looking to open up a PC shop or even a place folks can come in play games. Probably looking for something more along the lines of a GameStop, which I did check out. They don't franchise, they're all owned by the same corporation.

There's one or two others out there that do franchise like PlayNTrade, but for the most part, a google on "Video Game store franchise" turns up tons of sketchy sites of people that probably don't even have any brick & mortar stores.

#4 I owned and operated a children's toy store for several years. Traditional bricks & mortar retail is tough and the competition from Wal-Mart and Amazon.com for games is significant. You would be better off starting an online store where you sell the inventory *before* you buy it. Still, you'd be competing with all the other online sources out there. I think you could find a niche and stick to it and that may work. Like nothing but FPS, or "Sports Gaming World", or "War Gamers Foxhole", you get the idea.

#5 Keep in mind that the trend in game delivery is moving towards 100% online. The big publishers would love nothing more than to eliminate the cost of physical distribution and shelf space from the sales equation.