A VIDEO GAME BUSINESS

I remember the first day I visited a video game center with Arcade machines, it was one of my happiest moment.”The amazing thing to me was that the machines were hugely made of various sizes. When I first saw the graphics used on the Arcade, it was virtually outstanding. The first game I noticed was a game called Street Fighter 2 Champion Edition Turbo. I was astonished about it because I love martial arts, be it movies or video games. It was the fastest fighting video game I have ever set my eyes on. Another game that captured my eyes was a game called "Mortal Kombat." It also had a good graphics only for the fact that it wasn’t as fast as Street Fighter 2 Champion Edition Turbo. It had its amazing part because it was the bloodiest fighting game I have ever seen in my life. I played and played until the money on me finished. If not because I was hungry and I needed to go home, I could have stayed till Mad House (the name of the arcade center) closes for the day. I had never felt joy and astonished about how video games could turn out to be that good.

Video games were beautiful, exciting and addictive especially if one gets the kind of games he likes. For example, if you like Martial Arts, you will like fighting games. If you love soccer, you will like soccer games. The amazing thing about video games is that there are varieties of games to choose. We now have games that suits both males and females as well as grown ups. The opportunities I am mainly concerned here are the job opportunities video games provides to humanity.

Starting from those whom got the idea, to those whom implemented the idea, to those whom tested the idea without any side effects, to those whom sell the games, and to those whom consumes the products to these consumers, which creates joy, happiness, satisfaction, learning, opportunity to give it out as a gift, and the creation of friendship, but with one major disadvantage which is time stealing. The time stealing can be ignored since we all know that “all work without play makes jack a dull boy.” If you are angry or stressed up, and you enjoy playing games, it will help to ease it out for you. Also, everyone needs some form of pleasure. To the game fanatics, playing game is one. Do not underestimate playing games as a form of pleasure. It does because I was once a game freak, and I knew how I felt when I was so much into playing games. There are some Schools that do force their parents to buy any kind of video games for their kids to play during their leisure time because they found out that games helps to improves the students IQ. But only if he is disciplined to know when to play games and when to read or study. There are some games that involve difficult puzzles for the players to solve. It takes great intelligence to solve some puzzles. Some of them do take days or weeks to finish solving. The one you solve it, the more his IQ increases towards solving some problems. Also, it psychologically helps to teach students how to do things. For example, if you want to learn the basis of driving a car, get a top rated racing game to play. There are some game consoles that have the driving kit. It has everything a car has. It has its steering, brakes, accelerator, gears, hand brakes, driving meter etc. These sure help you psychologically and practically, but never in reality. We have games that are good for gym and sports. Like the Kinect for Xbox 360, Sensor movements for Nintendo Wii. Even Playstation 3 was not left behind. This gadget leverages you to play the game without using the games control pads. The chosen animated character or Avatar on the TV does exactly what you do or makes you do exactly what they want you to do. This works better when the game wants to teach you what you want to play in relation to the game you want to learn. For example, if you want to play a dancing game or learn how to dance or you want to use the dancing game to exercise your body, it will demonstrate the kind of dancing step it wants you to follow in accordance to what the Avatar is executing. If not, you will lose and be asked to play the same step gain. You have to get it right, before you can be allowed to move to the next dancing step. You can watch the recorded videos of all your dancing attempts. Other games are lawn tennis, soccer, golf etc.

For these exciting reasons, I decided to start a video game centre. I started by renting a shop. Fixed the shop with tiles, bought the right tables and chairs, bought three 30 inches TV sets, fans, generator in case there is any power failure, lighting bulbs for both indoors and outdoors. I bought three game consoles: Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and Nintendo Wii U with various CD’s for each. I had to buy three extra controllers for each game since they usually comes with just one controller. I called an electrician to fix all the lightings and sockets. I bought a big metallic sign board with disco lights for advertisement in order to attract people. Even if you were passing by my shop and you don’t know what kind of business I operate, the dancing disco light will force you to read what my shop is all about. I named the shop “Video Game Kingdom.”

Before I could say “When will customers start coming?” I started looking for a way to increase the size of my shop because the place was always filled up. The good thing about the business was that when you notice that your customers have started getting tired of the CD games you got, you can quickly get the latest CD's since new CD’s are being produced every month. Of course, you can’t keep buying CD’s every month. In fact, some of the games have longetivity. That is, some customers got tired of them not until after a year plus. In short, there are some games I always reserve their copies irrespective of whether customers ask for them or not because a customer can ask for it at any given time, and you may regret not having it anymore. This is very common with fighting games as well as some adventure games. For the games with short longetivities, I decided io add them to the shelves in front of my shop where I sell fairly used CD’s.

Quite all right, I was making money, but I needed to increase my earnings in order to achieve my dream. So, what I did was to purchase another TV. This time it was a Sony High Definition TV (1080 pixels). I increased the size by renting the shop beside my shop. I was lucky to have gotten the shop empty with no tenant in it. Then, I started to renovate the next shop up to the same level with my first shop. Besides, cash was flowing with no fear of expanding my business. I begged the landlord if he would allow me to break the wall in between the two shops, and we wrote an agreement to fix the walls back if one day I wanted to leave the shop. The wall was broken and I ended up with a bigger shop.

More money came in as many customers were able to play at the same time without someone waiting for another person to finish playing. So, I decided to move to the next level without wasting much time. I removed all my fans and sold them. Then I fixed three Central Air Conditioners. I knew three was okay for my shop especially during the hot season.

I started selling game magazines, and comics in the wooden cupboard, which I kept in front of my shop. I built a snack joint at the right hand corner of my shop by simply building a wooden bar and placed a fridge with transparent glasses so that thirsty customers can see the drinks they want to buy. I was making good sales for the fairly used CD’s I sell outside my shop, but I found out that it drove some customers from coming to play in my shop since they own the game at home, and my CD’s were very affordable compared to the price I bought them. I didn’t care since I had recovered my money from most of the CD’s I kept for sale. Just because I kept them for sale does not mean that I don’t use them when a customer wants to play it. All I do was to keep the CD posters in the shelves, and keep the main CD's in my shop. And when the demand for a CD is high in my game shop, I quit selling the CD by removing the poster in the shelf.

Anyway, this was the reason why I had to call some of my customers as well as new customers by fixing tournaments and competitions. Tournaments really helped me boost my income because most of the tournament participants did not come to play just for the fun of it, but because they were there to see if they were prepared enough for the up coming tournament and competitions. A registered tournament participant will know that he needs to train more if he finds out that some guys are playing better than him. Of course, he either keeps coming to play to improve his skills or goes home to practice with his own game, then come back to check if he has improved or not. I use to paste move list and tips in my game centre to encourage everyone to learn.

I had to learn how to set the tournament prices because a high price could decrease the number of registered participants, and a low price could increase their numbers. I use the market forces of demand and supply to form my price. I do buy gifts for first place, second place and third place. Of course, I do buy snacks and drinks for any tournament member. It’s just like they all saved for the three winners I made sure their tournament money does not interfere with my pocket money. But if it does, I was still ready to do it. After all, most of them are my customers and the tournament brings me lots of popularity, so why won’t I spend for them?

One of the problems I faced was the fact that some students sneaked out of their School to come and play video games in my video game centre. I had some serious issues with their parents concerning this matter. It almost affected my business. Then, I came up with a solution. What I did was to quit opening the shop until it is 2:00pm apart from weekends. Although, it was a hard decision to make, but I was surprised to have made even more money as the place always gets filled up. I guessed it was because in the morning, some people including the nearby students do come to buy snacks and drinks; some substitute playing games with buying and reading comics or game magazines; it gave me time to do other things like checking the latest games and game accessories, while my employees were in my shop selling these items; some adults or few kids do come to buy game CD’s; and the deprivation of playing games by adults or those whom do not go to School were some of the reasons why I made more sales. Besides, most people in the State prefer to play video games at night.

Like I said, some of them own the games in their homes, but for the fact that I made my video game centre highly competitive by fixing tournaments every month gave them a reason to come to test their might for the purpose of winning tournaments, which causes them to either defeat or be defeated by their opponent all for the fun of it. Thanks for reading!