The Numbers Worth Tracking in a Gaming Cafe
· 6 min read · The GameBiller team
Reporting is easy to generate and hard to use. The test for any number is simple: if it changed, would you do something differently? If not, stop looking at it.
Revenue per station
Total revenue tells you how the month went. Revenue per station tells you what to do about it.
A machine consistently earning far less than its neighbours is usually a layout problem — it is at the back, near the door, or facing the toilet — and moving it costs nothing. Occasionally it is a hardware fault nobody reported.
Occupancy by hour
This is the number that drives pricing, staffing and events. It shows exactly which hours are empty rather than which hours feel empty, and those differ more often than owners expect.
Look at it as a week, not a day. Patterns are weekly in this business.
Revenue by game type
PCs, consoles, VR and sims earn differently per square metre. Before buying more of anything, check which of them is actually paying for its floor space.
This is the number that should decide your next hardware purchase, and it is usually decided on instinct instead.
Repeat rate
What share of this month’s customers came last month too? A venue with a rising repeat rate is compounding; one with a falling repeat rate is buying new customers to stand still, which is expensive and eventually stops working.
This requires identifying customers, which requires capturing a phone number at billing. Without that, the number does not exist.
What to ignore
Vanity totals with no comparison. A revenue figure without last month next to it is not information.
Daily fluctuation. Days are noisy; weeks are signal. Reacting to a single quiet Tuesday is how you end up discounting for no reason.
Any report you have looked at three times without changing a decision.