Starting a LAN Gaming Center

It’s every gamer’s dream to be able to run their own sports league someday and most of the time, it starts with starting a LAN center and growing from there. With the numerous successes, we’ve had with helping centers set up their diskless PXE boot with CCBoot, we are almost always asked the same question after the setup. What software do I use to manage the time at my LAN Zone?

The answer is quite simple but equally complicated for one simple reason, the availability of so many POS and management software makes it a decision to lurk upon every time.

Let’s try and simplify this, shall we?

  1. Time tracking and user management

To start with, the primary revenue model of any gaming center is selling PC time by the hour or packages that customers can subscribe to. To simplify this, there are a few software you can consider. To name a few (and patting our own backs), we’ve got our very own iCafeCloud which allows you to login users with prepaid and postpaid sessions as required by your policies; There is also GGLeap, Gizmo and Senet. All these software will allow you to manage time and store user data. The best part is when using these software, you do not have to worry about asking customers to log out manually, most software provides a time-up warning and auto-log out once the user session is up.

All of this software also allows you to set a custom UI for the clients blocking their access to windows directly where some notorious peeps can possibly try and hamper the functioning of your systems or even worse, access content that you’d rather not want them to.

  • Reporting

Now here’s something you’d like to consider. You can either let your POS software handle the income tracking for you or you can make an excel sheet and enter income manually for every customer that walks in and buys from you. You can also probably make another excel sheet for keeping stock of the inventory you sell at your game zone. Say energy drinks, food or even gaming peripherals. While all this sounds super awesome if you’re old school, in the new age when time is the biggest currency, investing time in manually maintaining these spreadsheets is a little bit of a stretch. To combat this, again, you can give iCafeCloud, GGLeap or Gizmo a try and see if that helps you make your management and accounting super easy. As gamers say, GG EZ, bro!

  • Managing Multiple platforms

Most gaming centers opt in for multiple platforms. Say you’ve added a couple of PCs, a few Xbox Systems, Play Stations and Nintendo machines depending on the demand in your location of business. While none of the consoles allow you to have a 3rd party client OS or shell installed on them, iCafeCloud works with smart plugs and allows you to manage time directly from the admin panel along with the PCs like we’ve talked about before. This makes console management a bliss and the only thing you’re left to do is what you need to do the most, provide world class service to your customers.

  • Giving back VALUE!

So if you’re an entrepreneur, you already know that if you need to flourish, you need to provide value with every invoice you generate. Rewarding your customers with loyalty points can play a huge role in this process. iCafeCloud allows you to award your customers with coins that they can earn when they win games while iCafeCloud runs in the background. These coins then become an in store currency as they can be used to redeem gifts from your store! Of course, it is always up to you what gifts you want to give away and at what price. Remember, the higher the price, the more they play to collect the coins. And the more they play, well you know the rest. This also most definitely adds an element of gamification to your already game based business! Need to see how it works? Click here : https://www.icafecloud.com/wiki-use-game-coins.htm

  • License to Chill

Most online games require a purchased license from platforms like, Steam, Epic Games, Battle.Net,  Origin, Riot Games, Rockstar Games, Uplay, Mail.ru and so many more. And managing such all these licenses manually might even send Dr. Xavier into overdrive, and he’s a mutant just so you know! But don’t worry, you don’t have to have super powers to manage licenses, just add them to the manager panel on your café management software and you’re good to go. Anytime a customer needs a license, all they need to do is click the game and they’ll be auto logged into the game of choice! Now isn’t that a literal License to Chill, Mr. Games Bond? (Okay, bad pun but good tip, right?)

  • Accessibility

Now here’s another differentiator that you can consider when choosing a management software. So you’re the bigshot gaming Mogul who has too many centers to manage in the same city? You now face the biggest dilemma, how would you manage all of them from where ever you are?

While solutions like Gizmo and Pan Café will let you manage your center while you’re physically present at the center because they run on a local server, iCafeCloud, GGLeap and other cloud based services let you have complete control over the happenings of all your centers from anywhere in the world with any device! That’s right. Server based POS systems are optimized to run on a variety of devices using just the browser!

Choose wisely!

While these are just the basics that you will need to manage your gaming center like a pro, there’s a lot more that you can ask for from the software provider. Like, Tournament management, events and local language support for client UIs. There’s never an end to innovation that cloud based software can bring to your service!

Since you’ve read this far, as a part of our gratitude for sticking around, we’d love to offer you all these services at absolutely Zero Cost! To get started, just join our discord channel and ask for a free trial https://discord.gg/xgS9DrE