Social Gaming
Finally Some Numbers
Axe Throwing & Krazy Darts
LASERTRON laser tag is our primary revenue and traffic generator for our Buffalo venue and it has been that way for over 35 years and the same is true for our Rochester venue ever since it opened over 8 years ago. Our LASERTRON laser tag experience has been updated many times over the years and the focus has been on making it significantly more high-tech and appealing to adults. As of today, approximately 60% of our players are 18 and older.
Over the last 3 years, we have been diligently working to expand our ability to attract even more Adults by developing, operating, and continually improving our new, high-end Social Gaming experiences, which are specifically designed to attract Adults.
Axe Throwing was the first Social Gaming experience we added to our Rochester, New York entertainment venue. We installed it back in May of 2021.
8-Lanes of Axe Throwing located in our Buffalo, New York venue.
Axe Throwing Revenue
In the first full year of operating 8 lanes of Axe Throwing, we generated…
$144,891. It wasn’t as much as we hoped, but it generated more than double the revenue of the attraction it replaced.
We have spent and continue to spend a lot of time learning how to operate our Axe Throwing experience at the highest level possible. We are also working diligently to figure out how to make it an even better Social Gaming experience.
One example of this is that we are continuing to tweak our Axe Throwing seating designs to figure out which ones will maximize our guests’ ability to socialize with their friends, family, and coworkers.
Ultimately, our goal is to provide a far better Axe Throwing experience – especially one that is dramatically better than what the competitors in our market can offer.
In the second year we generated $233,284 in Axe Throwing revenue.
(Important note: we have Axe Throwing clients who are generating $50,000 per lane and one who is averaging over $100,000 per lane! These venues are a combination of being in better demographics than our two venues and/or very large venues with a much higher volume of guests visiting their centers annually. They are also very good operators. In fact, one operator generated over $2 million in Axe Throwing in their first year!!!)
At the beginning of our third year of operating Axe Throwing, we added our second Social Gaming experience which was (7) lanes of Krazy Darts.
New Krazy Darts version 2 located in our Buffalo, New York venue.
We were concerned that Krazy Darts was going to negatively affect our Axe Throwing revenue and it probably has, at least some, but with a little over 3 months to go in our fiscal year, our Axe Throwing is projected to generate $245,000 to $250,000, which is better than the $233,284 dollars it did the previous year.
Krazy Darts’ first full year is going to generate $100,000+ in Darts revenue.
Krazy Darts is obviously brand new and people just don’t know what the heck it is. It’s something you have to see in action to fully appreciate how cool and fun it is to play with your friends and family.
We expect the Krazy Darts revenue in year two to be much higher as more of our Adult groups get the opportunity to give it a try.
(Important note: We are beginning to see how well Krazy Darts is going to perform in various types of entertainment centers. We have one location with (4) lanes and it looks like they are going to earn between $150,000 and $160,000 in their first full year. It’s important to note that Krazy Darts sales continue to trend higher and we expect Krazy Darts to generate the same revenue as Axe Throwing and possibly more. The labor and the ongoing costs to operate Krazy Darts is much lower than Axe Throwing.)
When our last quarter is completed, we expect to reach $350,000 in Axe Throwing and Krazy Darts revenue, which will be a 50% increase in our Social Gaming revenue in just one year. Over the last two years, we will have increased our Social Gaming revenue by over 140%.
Our Social Gaming attractions are also generating another 50% from food and beverage sales, which equals $175,000 in additional revenue. Those two revenues, $350,000 in Social Gaming + $175,000 in Food and Beverage provide for a combined total of $525,000, making our Social Gaming experiences our second best revenue generator.
LASERTRON 100% LED Illuminated Laser Tag Arena located in our Rochester, New York venue.
While our Social Gaming revenue is still significantly behind what our LASERTRON laser tag arenas generate, we believe Social Gaming will catch up within the next 2 to 3 years. This will happen because we are adding multiple units of two new Social Gaming experiences within the next 12 months and a third one in about 18 months. In addition, we will be continuing to improve all of our Social Gaming experiences on a regular basis.
As a comparison to an older type of Social Gaming experience, we added 5 premium billiard tables with comfortable bar height booth seating and tables at the same time we added (7) Krazy Darts. The revenue from the 5 billiard tables is only going to reach about $13,000 for the year, which is not anywhere near as good as our Axe Throwing or Krazy Darts numbers. For reference, we spent $45,000 installing the 5 billiard tables which included the bar height booth seating and tables.
We also added (2) Table Tennis tables and (2) Foosball tables, but the revenue for all of them isn’t even worth mentioning because the numbers are so low. Both will be replaced in the next 12 to 18 months by the New Social Gaming experiences we are developing.
Important note #1: Axe Throwing and Krazy Darts are proving that they can earn significantly higher revenue per square foot than other existing types of Social Gaming experiences; including those that have existed for a very long time.
The reality is that we are just beginning to understand what can be done to make our existing games for Axe Throwing and Krazy Darts even more fun to play. We have barely scratched the surface when it comes to developing the best games – including new ones that are likely to be even more fun than our current games.
Important note #2: Krazy Darts’ labor to operate is significantly less than Axe Throwing, which requires a well trained Axe-Pert to teach guests how to successfully throw and stick an axe as well as to supervise the safe use of the attraction. Krazy Darts only requires a staff member to bring over the darts and spend about 2 to 3 minutes explaining how to use the touchscreen display, enter player names, take photos, pick teams, select games, and that’s it. The game turns off automatically when the group’s time expires.
Krazy Darts can generate 25% to 30% less revenue than Axe Throwing and generate the same net cash flow as Axe Throwing, because the labor cost to operate and maintain it is significantly less. If Krazy Darts generates the same or even more revenue than Axe Throwing, then the net cash flow will be much stronger.
By the way, it’s important to point out that we haven’t spent much time or money promoting our new Social Gaming experiences.
Why haven’t we spent much time or money promoting our NEW Social Gaming experiences?
The first reason is based on the following quote from over 100 years ago by John Wanamaker, a successful merchant:
“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
I think if we updated the quote today it would be more like this:
“80 to 90% of the money we spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is we don’t know which 80 to 90%.”
The second reason we have not spent a lot of time and money promoting our Social Gaming experiences is based on the Theory of Providing Great Value at a Reasonable Price (I made this up, but I think it’s 100% true or at least 99.9% true).
If what we are selling provides our guests with a truly Fun and Entertaining Social experience at a reasonable price, then our guests will tell their friends, family, and coworkers about the great experience and value THEY received from our entertainment venues.
As always, the best advertising is positive word of mouth and if we DO provide great value for our guests’ money, our sales will grow.
A third reason we spend so little time and money on promoting our new Social Gaming experiences is because it helps us to gauge how well our Social Gaming experiences are able to promote themselves within our two entertainment venues.
We are NOT suggesting that an entertainment venue shouldn’t promote their new Social Gaming experiences. In fact, we 100% agree that you should promote them. All we are saying is that a really good Social Gaming experience should be able to promote itself – especially if it’s positioned in a good location within an entertainment venue. What’s a good location for Axe Throwing and Krazy Darts? Close to the bar and in a highly visible area where our Adult guests can see it being played!
We do promote our Social Gaming and Attraction experiences, but we mostly utilize two marketing tools.
The first marketing tool is our weekly and monthly emails. We have collected and curated our emails over many years and currently have 60,000+ emails for each of our venues. Our second marketing tool is maintaining and updating both of our websites on a regular basis.
We use our weekly emails and websites to provide our guests with the latest information, hours of operation, pricing, and specials. We do a few other marketing things, but that’s basically 95% of what we do.
Another marketing strategy we use is built into our pricing offers for all of our attractions (see below):
The goal of our pricing is to sell our guests on our Most Popular option, which actually IS our most popular option – currently 60% to 70% of our guests select the Most Popular option.
The most important benefit to selling our Most Popular option is that it gives us the ability to offer our guests the opportunity to try one of our other attractions – especially during our busiest times when we are likely to have longer wait times for our most popular attractions. If our guests give one of our other or newer Social Gaming experiences a try and they love it, now they have an additional reason to come back to our venue.
If they don’t have enough time to experience a second Attraction or Social Gaming experience on their current visit, we provide 6 Bonus Credits that activate the next day and are valid for 20 days.
How does Social Gaming affect an Arcade’s revenue?
We only have 35 arcade games at each of our venues, but they still earn well. I was recently concerned about how our new Social Gaming experiences were affecting our arcade’s revenue. I was worried that it might be affecting it negatively. To my relief, our arcade’s revenue was actually up at both of our venues and its percentage of total revenue was up a little bit as well.
It can be dangerous to assume, but it looks like our Social Gaming experiences are acting more like an attraction that brings more people into our venues, which means our arcade benefits from the increased guest traffic.
It’s important to note that the vast majority of the guests we are attracting with our new Social Gaming experiences are Adults. This is partly because we require participants for our Axe Throwing to be 18 and older and we also require our Krazy Darts players to be 12 and older plus the parents are required to play with the kids.
New Krazy Darts version 2 located in our Buffalo, New York venue.
We believe the current wave of innovative Social Gaming experiences is a game changer for the out-of-home entertainment industry.
Most importantly, we are working diligently to offer our current and prospective clients with the opportunity to provide their guests with the Best Social Gaming experiences that are exclusive to their venues. See below for further details:
Limited Time Offer: Exclusive 2 to 5 Year Radius Protections for Krazy Darts and Axe Throwing
Buy any combination of (8) of our Social Gaming experiences (for example, (8) Axe Throwing or (8) Krazy Darts or (4) Krazy Darts and (4) Axe Throwing) by June 20th and receive a 5-Year Radius protection for up to 10 miles or 500,000 in population, whichever is reached first.
Buy any combination of (6) of our Social Gaming experiences (for example, (6) Axe Throwing or (6) Krazy Darts or (2) Krazy Darts and (4) Axe Throwing) by June 20th and receive a 2-Year Radius protection for up to 8 miles or 300,000 in population, whichever is reached first.
As always, please reach out if you have any questions or comments.
Thanks for reading!
Jim Kessler