There have been quite a few questions about the new software we are developing so I wanted to take the time to elaborate a bit more on what we are trying to accomplish.  This software has a few different areas of focus, so I will concentrate on each of them individually even though the software itself handles all of these things at the same time.

Local Competitive Play

This feature I am mostly excited about from the gamer’s perspective.  This is also the point that many LAN Centers feel is irrelevant but I think perhaps they are looking at it differently, in the old school sense of LAN parties and local servers.

When I talk about local competitive play there are few examples I want to use.  The first is looking back to when Gears of War came out on the 360.  That was perhaps our most popular competitive game for local play we have had in 10 years of business.  There were plenty of options for playing and ranking up online, but our store even on slow days had 10-20 players sitting in rooms just joining system link games to play.  Four players would form a team in one room and challenge four players in another room.  There were open lobbies for players to jump in and players would then search the store to find out who the user “treehugger” was that kept killing them.  2v2, 4v4 and all sorts of variants controlled by the players.

Another example is today I watch these competitive teams always looking for private matches on social media.  Games like Call of Duty Advanced Warfare and Halo have excellent matchmaking services, pre-formed teams and all players ever need.  Then why in the world are teams going on Twitter asking for wager matches, custom matches and other set-ups?  They don’t earn rewards in-game for those things and in most cases those matches are not even archived by the game producer.  There is no control for the players of online matchmaking games and they are looking for people with similar play styles to play with and against.

The final example I want to use is what we stumbled upon at Gen Con this past year by creating an hourly event we just called 5v5 Randoms for League of Legends.  Once we had 10 people in line, we randomly split them up into two teams and they played head-to-head.  We recorded if they won or lost and if a player managed to get three wins we gave them a medal.

What we want to do is similar to what you would do at a golf course or at a bowling alley.  Of course anytime you can show up and just pay to play.  Play however you want.  But in our case while you play we are going to track what you are doing and collect your stats and reward you.

If you like bowling and want to take it a step further, you can join a league.  Or if your business supports a charity event, you might play in a golf scramble.  If you are real serious you could even join the city championship or pursue more structured events.  With video games all of that needs to be available for these players at our stores.  What do they like about those things versus just playing online?  They like the idea of a structured event being more “official” than just grinding away in online servers.  Specific goals, specific objectives and the thought of real people playing, not just an online gamertag.

Using a bowling alley as my example, I haven’t seen one, but are any of them technologically advanced enough to have leaderboards inside the alley?  Today’s top scores, top bowler right now?  Join an event?  What if you could show up to play a game of bowling and your score was put against other scores at the same time at bowling alleys around the world?  Of course not everyone would care, some just want to go on a date and giggle while they flirt and have fun.  Some just take their kids for something to do.  But others would like the ability to join a structured event on a Tuesday even if there isn’t enough bowlers in your town to support a full league.

The problem for all LAN centers is that running events is so irrelevant because attendance is sporadic.  During the busiest times on the weekends there are plenty of people around to play, but they all might like to play different things and play them in different ways.  We have to take that LAN environment, automate it and create a WAN party for gamers at LAN Centers all over.

Want to play a “LAN” match in League of Legends but it just you and your buddy?  Then queue up and we will find 3 players from other LAN Centers to be on your team and 5 other players to play against you.  It is all automated, the players just form the party, play the match and our system gets the results automatically.  We record the player’s stats, give them rewards and they start “ranking up” inside of our WAN world.

Are you showing up on League of Legends Wednesday with your 4 buddies to play as a team?  Awesome!  Create your team and play against teams from your local center and centers all around your region.  Our system will assign matches, players play them and at the end of the night the team with the most wins gets the king of the hill prize.  Work for the LAN Center during this process?  Zero.

Now with CS GO things get even better.  “Why would players want to play in our private servers instead of playing in the already awesome online ranked CS GO servers?”  Well our servers will be running 24/7 regionally and rotating through different maps and game types.  Players will quickly learn to associate the other players with their local center tags which I think creates a different competitive atmosphere instead of just random people online.  The system will automatically handicap player’s coin earnings with their current ggCircuit rank during every match.  If you are new and you get a headshot on one of the top ggCircuit players, boom 250 coin bonus.  Are you the best in the server, your objectives are worth less so you might instead focus on getting to 100 knife kills which gives you a 500 coin bonus.

One of the coolest things for CS GO will also be the complete automation of creating servers for players and centers.  If you have a team of 5 from your center and you want to challenge another center to a wager match and they accept here is the process:  Both teams will automatically be charged a 500 coin wager from their balance.  A private server will fire up only allowing those 10 players access.  The server tracks all stats during the match and depending on the wagers automatically pays out to the players once the match is finished.

Players at your store getting super competitive?  Allow them to fire up their own clan server and host matches and whatever game type you want.  Slow Tuesday night at your store?  Create a CS GO night, fire up your own LAN Center server and give out bonus coins for objectives all night long.  Not enough players locally, then send out a challenge to all of the ggCircuit centers in your region.

Redemption/Reward System

This is the best feature that nearly every LAN center owner understands and agrees is valuable.  Just allowing players to earn coins for playing, being logged into Smartlaunch, creates a loyalty program that most small businesses would die for.  The ability to add in the skill side by giving out more coins for in-game accomplishments takes it to another level.  Sure you can get a free coffee at the gas station with their rewards card when you buy 5 coffees, but can you get a free coffee for being able to make the best coffee and drink it like a champion?

Players will accumulate coins and be able to “spend” those right in your store.  Each LAN Center has their own prize vault as well as items that ggCircuit will provide for players nationally and globally.  You decide your own local exchange rate.  Gamers all over the world will earn coins 50 per hour for being logged into their local center.  However you decide if you want a Mt. Dew in your store to be in your prize vault for 500, 1000 or 1337 coins.

One big feature I want to touch on here is also the ability for players to quickly realize the street market value of those coins and give them “discounts” on prizes that are given to us by sponsors.  For example, when Razer provides us a $99 gaming mouse as a prize, we can put that in our prize vault for a perceived coin value of $50.  Not only is the gamer able to redeem coins for a cool prize like a gaming mouse, but they are getting it for 50% off the retail value.  They will learn this quickly from the price of your regular items such as a Mt. Dew.  If your Mt. Dew is normally $1 and you also make it available in your prize vault for 100 coins, you just made every 100 coins worth $1 in your store  Then when the see the Razer mouse is only 5000 coins in the prize vault, they realize they are only “spending” $50 in coins to get a $100 gaming mouse.

Some features that LAN center owners might not realize is that we are also creating a badge system to go along with just the standard coin features.  For an example, here are a couple of badge examples we will be implementing:

“Playing at Different Stations”	Minimum 1 Hour Per Station	Coins
3 Stations	Finding Your Place	100
5 Stations	A.D.D. Much?	250
10 Stations	Taking a Trip	500
20 Stations	Nomad	750
30 Stations	Nomad Master	1000
40 Stations	Nomad Platinum	1500
50 Stations	Nomad Elite	2500

Hours Per Single Game	Name	Coins
1 Hour	Gave it a Try	100
5 Hours	Starting to Like it	250
10 Hours	Solid Test	500
25 Hours	Getting into It	1000
50 Hours	Love this Game	2500
100 Hours	Getting Addicted	5000
250 Hours	Game Master	7500
500 Hours	Game Master Platinum	10000
1000 Hours	Game Master Elite	25000

As you can see, these are things that are just rewarding players for accomplishing things that are already tracked in Smartlaunch.  We are just putting a value to what they are doing and recognizing their accomplishments when they do so.  There are other big opportunities as well with rewarding players for trying new games that a developer will pay the LAN Center to feature.  Why would they pay you to feature their game?  Because at the end of the week/month/year you can show them exactly how many hours the game was played and prove that game centers are a great place for promotions, especially in this gaming world that is going 100% digital soon.

Bigger, Serious eSports Events

The biggest complaints from LAN centers owners against running tournaments is that almost all of the participants displace regular customers and the prize pools eat up any profits.  The underlying problem of eSports is that there is a big gap between traveling around the country to play in high dollar events or playing in some online event.  In-person events are just more legit.  This is where we need to take advantage of our local presence with gamers as well as the ability to give some legitimacy to a large scale event that runs online but is not from someone’s bedroom.

ggCircuit started 6 years ago for that sole purpose.  Giving LAN Centers the ability to host a larger payout event at their store without needing the space to hold hundreds of players.  In two weekends we will host a League of Legends tournament that at the time of this blog is taking place at 11 LAN centers around North America.  Saturday teams play locally until there is only two teams left and then Sunday the teams return to their local LAN center to play online against the other stores.  The prize pool is currently $2000 + Riot is supplying Riot Points and skins for the top teams.

With our new system, we can automate things to allow centers to hold a league or ladders over a longer period of time building up to the big championship online event.  Instead of filling up their stores on a busy Saturday, maybe only the top 4 teams who have qualified in the previous 4 weeks are invited to play that day.  Again, these types of things are normally nightmares to create, promote, register, administrate and just “put up with” for owners.  Marketing materials and administration can happen at the ggCircuit level taking the burden off the local stores.

What does this give the players?  The chance to play in really large national events by just visiting their local LAN center.  What does this give the centers?  The ability to take advantage of the growing eSports scene in their smaller stores with minimal effort.

Sponsorship Opportunities

The final thing I want to touch on briefly is the opportunity of sponsorship from a multitude of different companies.  Of course in the LAN center business everyone thinks of gaming companies.  One of our best partners kicking this off is Razer and we are super grateful for their support so far.  You can see in the screenshot to the right that we are giving the a dominant space on our website and every center participating for free Razer prizes will do the same.

Beyond the game companies the market of 18-24 year old male is a pretty lucrative one.  Advertisers are really crazy to get their name or product in front of young men that they believe can become brand loyalists for life.  This makes what we are building valuable to an entire different group of companies.  Insurance companies for example know that getting a customer on board early in life could be a 25+ year client.

The key metric into what we can give these companies goes way beyond an ad on a website.  Our system will have leaderboards displayed on every screen in the LAN center, with sponsor’s names and logos on the headers.  Want to join the Axe Body Spray challenge this week where they are giving away $1000?  Just jump into this CS GO server and every shotgun kill (get it? body spray?) will give you one entry into the daily and weekly drawing for these great prizes.  On the CS GO server a PSA comes through the screen every 10 minutes and reminds players if they want hot girls to like them they need to use Axe Body Spray.

The other big benefit to sponsors is that we will be able to give them solid, real-time data of their brand advertisements in progress.  How many screens are showing this right now, this week or this month?  How many players are in the server while your advertisement is posted? How many players around the world can you reach through 200 game center’s websites?

Wrap-Up

Hopefully this will answer some of the questions from LAN center owners on what exactly we are planning with the software and how many possibilities exist to use it for all of our benefit and growth.  At the least, it gives me a page to share with potential centers in the future about ggCircuit and the software we have developed.

eBash is turning 10 years old this month.  The official date we opened was December 10th, 2004.  We will celebrate at our stores the weekend after that day since the 10th this year is a Wednesday.  However the real celebration for us is the fact that after 10 years we are looking to re-invent the LAN Center model worldwide.

There is still a real disconnect between “Why would I pay to play at a LAN Center” and the typical answer that all owners like myself immediately answer with: “Because it is more fun to play together in person”.  The problem is that there is not honestly a tangible reason for players to come to our stores.  Playing socially in the same physically space is not a REAL reason.

From 10 years of experience here is a REAL list of reasons players come to a LAN Center:

– For a special event.  Celebrate a birthday, play in a tournament, try out a new game, relatives in town want something to do, etc.  This has always been true and is almost always the best way for finding new long term customers if you make the experience epic enough.
– To get some independence from mom & dad (middle/high school age) or from spouse/kids (older adults).   Lots of gamers love our overnight events and lots of parents/spouses love that option also.  Mom and Dad want a night out?  Your wife going to an all-weekend event with her friends?  Your daughter having 3 screaming friends over to play Just Dance 3 all night?  All good reasons to head to the local LAN Center.
– For the convenience of larger gatherings to play games on different systems.  Many players are all about bringing their systems to each other’s houses to play all weekend, but there is a break point of 2-3 friends when it becomes nearly impossible.  If you want to play League of Legends all weekend together with 4 other friends on your team the reality of 5 players having somewhere to all setup, the systems for all 5, the network/internet and somewhere they won’t bother other residents of the abode is very unlikely.
– Lack of a good gaming set-up at home.  This is becoming even more rare, but we still even see customers show up that have been gone for years when their PC is on the fritz, or they forgot to pay their internet bill or they are fighting with their parents/spouse.

Those are all great reasons, but none of them really lend themselves to a reason to play at the center more than a few times each month other than a lack of a good gaming set-up at home.  And I still don’t seem many players ACTUALLY coming to play for the reason all game centers claim is the best, for the social experience.

A little over a year ago it came to me the idea of putting a REAL reason out there for gamers of all ages/skills to visit their local game center.  I wanted to use what I feel is our biggest asset to reach gamers all over the world.  We are LOCAL.

LAN stands for Local Area Network.  There is always things happening online for gamers, there is even big huge events happening in large cities periodically.  The one thing that we don’t have going for gamers is consistent and plentiful events somewhere nearby.  The two things lacking to do this in a LAN Center is that owners don’t have the time or the drive/desire.  I have plenty of drive/desire but I cannot even keep up.  Sadly beyond the time is that many LAN Center owners are gamers first and business owners second.  So the drive/desire is not even present.

Just quickly, let me clarify that “Events” is not just huge things like tournaments.  Events to me are things with a purpose and a scheduled specific happening.  LAN centers try to do this sometimes with a specific weeknight dedicated to a particular game.  We hold a “lock-in” every weekend that is not really more than us staying open all night, but we make it an event by “locking” the doors from the outside at midnight.

So what is holding us (LAN Centers) all back?  Time?  Nah, if my idea is correct and we can double sales in LAN Centers by running consistent events then we would just hire more people to handle the extra work/time.  I finally identified what I think is the main problem for all of us in the LAN Center Industry.

We need an automated system to promote, host and archive events of all kinds.

So here is just a little bit of what we are working on:

– 6 months ago we began development on a new software system which runs on top of our center management and POS (Point of Sale) software.  That system started in beta at our eBash stores with integration for RIOT’s popular game, League of Legends.  The entire purpose is to track what players are doing and reward them for accomplishments both in-game and in the local store.

– We added 4 stores in Sweden, owned by Good Game and Escape Gaming to the system in late October.  We wanted to test our formulas and architecture in the European environment.  We also added PC Gamerz out of Hawaii so we would have an additional North American partner as well as someone in about the latest possible time zone in the world.

– Now we are reaching out to add 40 more centers before the end of the year.  We have a dozen lined up just through word of mouth.  We will be doing some marketing and other outreach starting this week.

What are some of the highlights of this system?  Here are some main things that I am the most excited about :

• The ability for players at LAN Centers to “team up” with players from other LAN Centers around the region and world.  For example: The only reason there is not a good following of CS GO players at centers is that it takes a solid 10 players to get a match going.  We will have regional CS GO servers running for players to join that are only accessible from your local LAN Center.
• Always-Running Challenges.  Wager matches are popular right now but very questionable.  The concept however is a solid one, put something on the line against other players and the winner-takes-all.  This system will allow players to queue up for a match anytime for a chance to win extra coins.
• The Coin System.  This is the basis for everything.  No matter what you do at a LAN Center, you can earn virtual coins while you play.  These turn into currency that you can spend at the LAN Center for snacks, drinks or hours.  However the larger value is that national sponsors are coming on board to provide BIG prizes for players.  How about the latest and greatest Razer headset or mouse?  You can earn coins toward that prize doing what you would normally be doing, except that you cannot earn prizes like this just playing at home.
• On the sponsored side, we can finally get more support for up-and-coming games.  Take Smite for example.  It is not close to the popularity of League of Legends or Dota 2, but it is getting some momentum.  We can feature Smite at hundreds of game centers around the world and TRACK automatically the number of games played and all of their in-game statistics.  An example of a Smite weekend at these stores would allow players to get an entry into a drawing for every Smite game they play AND an extra entry to the drawing for every 100 kills in the game.  Then every hour our system will randomly select a winner to receive some epic in-game prizes from Smite which is announced LIVE on display screens at every center AND on every single player’s screens at those centers.
• Integration with nearly every game and system.  We are building this to reach as many games and systems as possible.  For example we want to integrate with Xbox Stats/Achievements and Playstation Stats/Trophies.  We plan on integrating this with Steam achievements also.  We want there to be something that appeals to all gamers at all levels.
• The ability to not only run LOTS of events but to track everything within those events.  Hosting a League of Legends tournament is a LOT of work.  Not just marketing the event and running it, but there is so much administration that people take for granted.  However when we run these we always see a new batch of players coming out to try their hand at a more serious competition.  With our new system running these events will become so easy to administrate that there will be events every single weekend at every single LAN Center.
• Pooling resources from LAN Centers supports the concept that the WHOLE group is greater than the sum of the parts.  Centers can utilize the space they have and put their players into events they would normally not be able to support.  $10,000 tournaments will become a regular thing each weekend and players will not have to travel farther than their local LAN Center to participate.

This is a big task.  Not only has eBash shouldered the burden of the initial development of this software (currently already in the tens of thousands of dollars) I am also personally making it my mission to unite a group of extremely independent owners around the world to play nice together.  However so far the response has been very good and over the years I have made some great friends in the LAN Center industry that are grabbing my hand to join in the push.  We will see what the next 6 weeks has in store for us.

It could very well be the biggest jump in our business since the day we opened 10 years ago and the biggest leap forward this industry has seen.