In recent years, they have also tried new development directions.
As usual, Wu Fei came to Niangyan South Road again and opened the door of Xinglio Internet Cafe. Just less than a thousand meters away, the majestic palace of the Potala Palace is still standing quietly as it has been for hundreds of years.
Wu Fei is the general manager of Star Rio Esports and the president of the Lhasa Internet Cafe Association. Although he is not free every day, he still often visits different stores to learn about the “first line” that belongs to him.
Like many other Internet cafe operators, they have been trying new directions in recent years. Changes in the market and the repeated outbreak of the epidemic have put the Internet cafe industry in a challenge that everyone has to face. Only this time, Wu Fei knew that some changes had to be made.
1
As early as 2000, Wu Fei opened his first Internet cafe in Lhasa.
For many of us, Lhasa might just be a destination on a travel bucket list. Wu Fei, who is a native of Chengdu, was originally thinking of coming to play because of his brother’s work here, and then he discovered the local Internet cafe market with good prospects, and took root there.
Even a city famous for religion and tourism, Lhasa, like other non-first-tier cities, has a young population that cannot be ignored, and they also have the need to surf the Internet. Even though it has been diluted by emerging entertainment activities such as mobile games in recent years, there is still a lot of such demand, not to mention the tourists who come and go here can also provide about 40% of the passenger traffic.
Recalling the first store, Wu Fei still clearly remembers the scale of 16 computers, which was outstanding among his peers with an average of about 10 machines per store at that time. Practitioners from that era are very clear about why the Internet cafes at that time became synonymous with dirty and messy. In fact, including himself, many regular Internet users did not like that kind of environment.
So in 2013, they took the lead in trying to transform from an Internet cafe to an Internet cafe. In addition to upgrading the machine configuration, the interior decoration, seat cushions and other environments have also embarked on a more high-end and comfortable route. Measures such as smoking cessation in the entire store have made the entire Internet cafe more and more far away from the smoky image of the past, and the new look that has always been clean and refreshing has come to today.
Star Rio Internet Cafe interior
However, the upgrade of the environment and configuration also means an increase in the price. Especially in such a city with a low level of consumption, many people have doubts about its ability to return to capital, but its operators are not too worried.
Also as an Internet cafe brand in a small town near the border, Tangkou E-sports from Honghe Autonomous Prefecture in Yunnan has just upgraded most of its in-store graphics cards to the RTX30 series, which is the new standard for mid-to-high-end Internet cafes a few months ago. But in terms of price, the starting RTX3060 is still 5 yuan per hour, which is the same as their average price 9 years ago.
“In our cities, if the price is more than 10 yuan, no one will go.” Li Xiang, general manager of Tangkou E-sports, feels that compared with their counterparts in first-tier cities, they have many advantages: young people’s choice of entertainment activities Simpler, slower pace of life, less stress, and more time to spend in Internet cafes. But these things are based on the level of consumption power that is difficult to compare with first-tier cities.
Internet Cafe Partitions by Graphics Card Model
In recent years, Li Xiang has met too many colleagues and jumped into this industry with the mentality of making quick money. They choose to open a store next to their peers and open the door for three months for free to attract customers. They always do some “unreasonable” invoicing. But often after a period of time that is doomed to not improve much, the equipment will soon be sold and the store will be closed.
Li Xiang feels that many of these people know nothing about the industry. “When everyone thinks that an industry is profitable, then the industry is not far from the reshuffle.” On this point, he and investors The 3 to 5-year standard set in the payback cycle is relatively looser.
Mid-to-high-end brands can indeed attract local young people better, but in the final analysis, this is actually the small profit but quick turnover model used by “small town youth”. Being able to build a brand with 20 stores in Honghe Prefecture, Yunnan, Li Xiang felt that it was crucial to identify the industry rather than short-term returns. “It’s a slow-paced investment.”
2
Similar to the high-end Internet cafes in these small cities, the e-sports hotels that have emerged in recent years are also not the most popular in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. On the contrary, the second- and third-tier cities such as Zhengzhou, Xi’an and Harbin have become the “golden locations” in this industry.
Xiao Zhigang of the Alien E-sports Arena in Harbin is also a hardware dealer while running his own e-sports hotel and Internet cafe. So he knows very well that some hotel operators who want to add e-sports rooms in their stores are just following the trend, and they don’t know what the specific selling points are.
Although some hotels have a good overall environment, they only buy some previous-generation 20-series graphics cards or even second-hand equipment in terms of hardware, and even the starting-level RTX3060 of ordinary Internet cafes cannot keep up. After some exaggerated “e-sports style” decoration, it was put up under the brand of “e-sports room”, and the evaluation was not as good as the real e-sports hotel with lower price.
The “themed e-sports room” of a star-rated hotel features gifts such as happy beans as room features
In the process of the evolution of Internet cafes to e-sports hotels, operators have different versions of the origin story. Some people think that the prototype of the e-sports hotel comes from the training needs of professional teams to play games in other places. The professional team always had to run from both ends of the Internet cafe to the hotel, so he and the team leader discussed how to transform the private room into a hotel.
In another saying, when a new Internet cafe was renovated, some guests occupied a private room of the Internet cafe for a long time, and then gradually added furniture such as sofas and beds, gradually forming a private space for sleeping and playing. Other guests feel good after visiting this kind of room, and there are more and more the same needs, and then there is the e-sports hotel.
Although there are some discrepancies between the two statements, they both originate from the need to combine “living” and “playing”, and “playing” is always the starting point.
Huang Hua, the founder of Koala Internet Cafe, worked in the hotel industry for two years before starting an Internet cafe, so they have also entered the field of e-sports hotels in the past few years. At the same time, he has been involved in the Internet cafes and the hotel industry, and he also believes that e-sports hotels are closer to the upgrade of Internet cafes than traditional hotels, and there is a big difference between the two in terms of customer base.
There are more than 200 koala stores in the country, and it is already a big brand of Internet cafes in China.
Most of the customers of traditional hotels are non-local business people, but according to their e-sports hotel statistics, “60% to 70% of them are local customers, and the proportion of frequent customers is also much higher than that of ordinary hotels.” Therefore, compared with hub locations such as train stations and airports, it is a better choice for e-sports hotels to open in residential areas with stable local tourist sources.
According to Huang Hua’s observation, many customers who go to the e-sports hotel come in groups of three or five, and they are actually the same group as the audience of the Internet cafe. If the time on the plane is long enough, the average price of the e-sports hotel is not much different from that of the Internet cafe, so they choose the e-sports hotel with better privacy. Many times, they don’t even sleep here.
In e-sports hotels, “staying” is often just an added value of “playing”. Only by seeing this difference can we better identify the real consumer groups. For other operators, they play this added value more tricky.
3
Unlike many of its peers, Lushu E-sports in Xi’an did not hesitate and choose between the two evolutionary directions of Internet cafes and e-sports hotels, but created a novel combination of Internet cafes and e-sports hotels. model.
Since 2018, they have begun to try to integrate these two modes. “Since the source of customers is the same, let’s just do it together.” Wang Ke, a shareholder of Greentree E-sports, thinks that the two models can be used to drain each other. Internet cafes are cheaper and more friendly to fragmented time, while e-sports hotels are more private and can meet accommodation needs. The two can make up for each other’s shortcomings and better cover customer needs.
It sounds like this form is very beautiful, and it seems to have fully covered the Internet cafe customer base, but in fact, this is not the focus of their comprehensive model.
Even in a “dormitory-style” room, the RTX30 series graphics card is still used as standard
Now many Internet cafe practitioners agree that “it is not another Internet cafe that beats Internet cafes, but the new choice of these customers”. The rise of industries such as escape room and script killing in recent years has given them a sense of crisis. Young people only have so much energy and time, and how to attract them into Internet cafes has become a headache for these bosses.
The answer given by Lushu E-sports is “join if you can’t beat it”.
Since what I am doing is a synthesis, it is better to make it more “integrated”. Therefore, in the complex of Green Tree E-sports, you can see board game rooms, video game rooms, billiard rooms, electric mahjong tables, KTV, escape room, massage, sauna, etc., all kinds of things you can think of, or Unexpected entertainment.
Even in their different stores, there are different “resident pets” such as cats, dogs and alpacas to meet the needs of female customers to punch in and take pictures.
When the impact of the epidemic was not great, they still held games in the store and invited well-known teams to the store for exhibition games. When a large-scale e-sports event is broadcast, the area that combines the functions of a bar can also become a viewing area, which has the atmosphere of a traditional bar during the World Cup.
All of these services are included to provide consumers with one-stop services. No matter what potential consumers want to play, or have not yet thought about playing, they can “come to talk about it, and then choose slowly”.
Like many other operators, they agree that today, whether it is an e-sports venue or an e-sports hotel, they no longer simply rely on network fees, but increasingly begin to emphasize additional services on top of basic functions. It’s just that they didn’t set a limit on their scope, and they stayed in the aspect of “living”, so they have the current comprehensive model.
Just looking at the corner of the room can’t tell the identity of its e-sports hotel
“Many guests play those other things as early adopters.” Their additional gameplay gives guests more choices, but according to their observation, the number of guests who sit down to surf the Internet in the end is still the majority, which is just a means to retain customers. Maybe because of the type of customer source, he still felt that “even if there is a mahjong machine in the room, if there are not a few RTX30 series computers, it will not be able to retain people.”
As for whether it can become the mainstream form of Internet cafes in the future, the operators of Greentree E-sports feel that they are still uncertain. But at least in the current state of good results, they think this is a development direction worth trying, especially in the environment where the Internet cafe industry is facing challenges.
Also facing the long-term epidemic, e-sports hotels and Internet cafes have been affected differently. When Internet cafes in many places have to close, e-sports hotels can still open for business. But the mentality of the operators is actually not much different.
This is partly because the challenges facing the industry are not limited to the epidemic. The transformation of the business model and the transformation of the business philosophy are all problems they face together – they can’t still hold on to the stereotype of “e-sports hotels, Internet cafes are Internet cafes that have changed their name”, and that’s why they have the front various attempts.
When talking about the best business of Internet cafes, many operators will mention the birth of “PUBG Mobile”, the “popular Internet cafe”. The content problem of the game industry upstream of Internet cafes is also an external factor mentioned by many operators. “League of Legends was the most played ten years ago, and it will still be it ten years later. Only better games can attract more people to play.”
But fortunately, in the eyes of these relatively successful operators, the current environment is both a challenge and a reshuffle.
If you look for the industry instead of “low threshold and quick money”, then in this accelerated screening of forced participation, the first to be eliminated will only be unintentional followers. All they need to do and can do is to find a new form of themselves and wait for the external environment to improve.
“Internet cafes may one day be eliminated by the times, but definitely not now.”
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