13 ms·
Escape rooms are big business
- gkoberger 7y agoI built an escape room in San Francisco! It's a loving parody of startup culture (Startup Escape), and while I built it because it seemed like a fun challenge, it's also bringing in a good amount of business still. If you're in SF and build it custom, you can make some money. If you are in a random place with low rent and you buy an off the shelf game, you can make a ton. If anyone is interested in building one and has questions, ask away!
- eric_khun 7y agoNice! I have a couples of questions if that's okay :) 1- Are you making profit? How long did that take you to be profitable? 2- In what do your spend money? Mind sharing a breakdown? 3- Who is your typical customers? Do they come back? How do you reach them?
- _trampeltier 7y ago3- If a place has more than one room some people come back and try the other rooms too. But if you did escape from a room, you already solved the puzzle and it's not fun to do it again. Most people I know did it with some other people from work. Also myself, somebody at work asked and we went with around 10 people to a place with two rooms.
- mirceal 7y agoi think this is the big problem with escape rooms. zero replay value. now imagine that the puzzle/escape is custom build, for you, each time. you can literally play the “same” room hundreds of times. how about designing the room and having your friends bash their heads against the wall. this space is ready for disruption!!!
- tomrod 7y agoWe played a variant where you "find treasure." This made reconfiguration simple!
- mirceal 7y agoi was thinking a blend of physical and virtual but that may increase the cost of building the escape room significantly.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- lazerwalker 7y agoThis is a cool idea, but also a pretty unsolved problem, even in digital games. Heck, computers can't even procedurally generate decent crossword puzzles. Best comparison point I can think of are roguelikes, but even if you can figure out a way to make custom hardware build-out easy, roguelikes largely work by making replayability cheap. It's hard to build an on-ramp to teach players about the interactions of complex systems when each playthrough costs them $50+ and takes an hour plus transpotation time.
- mirceal 7y agois disagree. while it may be expensive it’s far from unsolved (im the virtual world of course)
- ninth_ant 7y ago> how about designing the room and having your friends bash their heads against the wall. I think you underestimate the skill and time it requires to make engaging puzzles. The big chains will solve the repeatability issue by swapping puzzles around their world locations. I assume they are doing this already.
- gkoberger 7y agoDefinitely! 1/ The up-front costs were $30k for me, and it took about 8 months to make it back. After operating costs, I make anywhere from $1k to $5k/mo. (Once in a while I lose money) 2/ I want to do a real blog post, but high level: $3.5k rent, $2k for a manager, $2k for labor, $1k for other utilities, and then money on things like adwords, etc. 3/ They would come back, except we only have one room! On weekends we get a lot of tourists, on week days we get a lot of team bonding from startups and larger companies. So, while they don't come back, their coworkers tend to. (This is atypical for most escape rooms in the US, though. Most have 3-5 rooms, and very few "company outings".)
- evolve2k 7y agoI live in a smaller city where I’d say the number of escape rooms is about equivalent to the number of bowling alleys (less than 5 of each come to mind). How’s the best way to measure if the market is saturated?
- dfeojm-zlib 7y agoI would find a better (defensible) business model that's better than a restaurant that anyone can open. ER's have zero intellectual property and anyone can start such a business for little investment. Do something else (hard/er/expensive/tedious for most people) that lends itself to greater monopolization by you, and that's profitable. (Build something defensible and profitable that customers love.)
- EForEndeavour 7y agoWould your advice to anyone interested in building an escape room not to build an escape room?
- TheSoftwareGuy 7y agoNot everyone needs to be a billionaire monopolist, I think most people can be happy with a solid consistent income
- braythwayt 7y agoI wrote some books. Books are completely indefensible. There are billions of the things, and new ones get written all the time. I made some money. I was and am very happy to have written books. Is writing books a good business? Perhaps not, if viewed through the “The world is divided into unicorns and NOOPs” lens. But I don’t look at the world through that lens. See also: Making music, opening a social pub, running a day care, organizing festivals or conferences... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifestyle_business https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifestyle_business
- lozenge 7y agoDo these rooms have an online booking system? Check their occupancy rate!
- throwaway00009 7y agoAwesome! Care to share some stats / revenue?
- zerr 7y agoHow to come up with the pricing?
- nailer 7y agoClickable link. This seems fun (and ridiculous) https://startupescape.com https://startupescape.com
- fortes 7y agoWas just there about 10 days ago with my team! Good times, we solved it in about 45 minutes :)
- gkoberger 7y agoCongrats! That's quick for the room :)
- gambiting 7y agoThe whole industry has sort of collapsed over here in Poland after a tragedy few months ago where few teenagers died in a fire[0] - their room was actually locked with no means of emergency exit, which was of course illegal and against building regulations, but it caused such a stir in the media and widespread panic that a lot of these businesses just had to close following the tragedy and the industry hasn't yet recovered. [0] https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/04/five-teenagers-killed-after-fire-in-escape-room-in-poland https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2019/...
- gkoberger 7y agoI haven't been in a single US escape room where you couldn't just... walk out. Most creators in the US are aware of this, and don't take the "Escape" part too seriously. And of course, in the US, this is heavily enforced.
- the_mitsuhiko 7y ago> And of course, in the US, this is heavily enforced. Is it? How does this work? Are there regular checks and do escape rooms need to register or how are they discovered?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- marcell 7y agoI made a site to help people find escape rooms, at www.escapespy.com. Check it out if your looking for available bookings in your area.
- scrollaway 7y agoHow did you get available booking times for all these rooms?
- marcell 7y agoA lot of scrapers!
- ericlavigne 7y agoThis seems very close to being a tool I would use. My wife and I like to play escape rooms together. There's just two of us, and we prefer a team size of 5-6. So I often hunt through booking pages for rooms that already have a team of 3-4 signed up, so that we can join them. This tool lets me search for rooms that are available (which is almost all of them) or booked (which I think means fully booked - not clear). I would want to search for rooms that are partially booked, preferably with 3-4 people and room for 2 more to join. Totally separate issue - the hardest part has been finding locations that we like. So far we've found two that we love a lot: the Great Escape Room in Miami and the Master Escape Room in Boca Raton. Of course we've played every room in both places. Yelp reviews are mostly written by people who just did their first escape room, and even frequent escape roomers like us seem to vary a lot in preferences.
- marcell 7y agoYea that data (partial bookings) would be great. It’s hard to get reliably, I have it for some rooms but not others. Once I have more quality on it I’ll start showing it on the site. At the moment, booked means fully booked. This site also has a review feature. Please add some reviews :). It shows how many rooms the reviewer has done, so you know if it’s a new person or someone with experience.
- prvc 7y ago>Escape rooms Referring to a form of structured entertainment; not to be confused with "panic rooms" or "escape hatches".
- 0xcde4c3db 7y agoThe article seems to really gloss over the fact that the "escape the room" concept was a media trope or even subgenre before this industry exploded. The history discussion skips the years that the concept really started becoming popular in media. The best-known examples are probably in the Saw franchise, but it's also a popular genre in casual gaming. As far as I remember, it really took off ~15 years ago with Toshimitsu Takagi's Flash games (Crimson Room, Viridian Room, White Chamber; the latter should not be confused with the sci-fi horror game the white chamber). There are other semi-popular franchises that use the concept within a larger framework, as with some of the Saw sequels (Zero Escape, Danganronpa). This, in turn, probably has a less direct relationship to films and TV episodes that focus on a single room to save budget or create psychological tension (as with the original Saw), without escape necessarily being a major theme.
- c256 7y agoThe article gives a couple possible “firsts” for escape rooms, on of which is specifically described as an attempt to bring _Crimson Room_ into real space. Maybe you were just looking for a reference to _Saw_?
- 0xcde4c3db 7y agoYeah, I'm not sure how I missed that reference. I looked for several things, one of which was the Crimson Room series. I probably jumped around too much while backtracking.
- 6thaccount2 7y agoI really like the idea of escape rooms, but have never had the chance to do one. My area just had one or two shut down, so I might have missed the chance.
- GuB-42 7y agoAre repayable escape rooms possible? Surely, some of owners thought about that. The way I would imagine that would be better than to have puzzles that can be switched from a real puzzle to a "trap" puzzle. A trap puzzle would be a red herring especially designed for people who did the original puzzle. For example, in the the original puzzle you have to find blue stones that arrange to a specific pattern that correspond to a code. The trap version would be a few completely irrelevant blue stones that would be unlikely to grab attention to the people who didn't do the first puzzle. For example they could be used as dead weight for a scale-based puzzle or as rubbish the players has to look through in order to find the real clue. The idea loosely comes from Danganronpa. An kinda escape room-like video game. The sequels tend to play with players expectations, sometimes confirming them, sometimes to turn them against the player. Edit: I realize it is much easier said than done. However, non-replayability looks like such a big problem that I guess that it could be worth making a lot of extra effort.
- ma2rten 7y agoWhy not just design the room so that you change the puzzles easily?
- jccooper 7y agoThat’s a big “just”. A high quality game usually involves a lot of integration with the physical space.
- krapp 7y agoI'm thinking that VR/AR might be a perfect solution to this, but that seems so obvious that I have to assume the technology just isn't ready yet, or there are other unknown factors standing in the way. Maybe it just wouldn't be as much fun. Still, a mostly empty warehouse and a few sets of goggles seems more cost effective, and a virtual set would be easier to reconfigure and reload.
- GuB-42 7y agoI think the technology is ready. There are some games exploiting the concept, "I expect you to die" is more or less an escape room. We can make it a cooperative multi-player game to get the teamwork effect of real escape rooms. An existing example would be "keep talking and nobody explodes", a cooperative, semi-VR game. The thing is, as fun as it is might be, it is an entirely different experience. On one side you won't get the feedback of real life items and people. On the other side you can do things that would be too expensive, too dangerous or simply impossible to do in real life.
- justinator 7y agoI went to one here in Boulder, and that was enough for me. Couldn't really control my suspension of belief (like say, a good movie with a silly, but engaging plot) to get into to it, and each puzzle just felt like work. You kinda hope for say, Myst, but in real life, but felt more like a weekly Martin Gardnir, but just scattered about a room, and I had to pay $35 to solve it. My mind literally went to chores I'd rather be doing instead being where I was. All the props just felt like someone went to a thrift store. I should've drank considerably more before participating - the same feeling you get at like, a funeral for someone you dont really know.
- cryptozeus 7y agoThat was funny. I think if you go in a group like from work or with friends then it helps. If you are thinking of chores instead having fun then you need this more not less.
- RHSeeger 7y agoThat sounds a lot like a reply from someone who enjoys an activity and can't fathom that someone else wouldn't. I get that a lot when people (my wife) tries to convince me to go to the beach. I _abhor_ the beach and she just assumes I "not doing it right" in some way. To be fair, I don't mind the activities around the beach so much (shops, soft serve, etc). However, that's not what the majority of people want to do with their time.
- Kiro 7y agojustinator's comment reads like Escape Rooms are overhyped and not worth it, and that it's something most people who have tried it think but it's literally the first time I've ever heard someone describe it like that.
- justinator 7y ago(just to be clear, I went with a group). But the easiest way I can describe it: it's like going to a really bad haunted house and it's my job to scare myself.
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoMy buddy makes his living building escape rooms (in the US)
- Mathnerd314 7y ago"Big business"? 2300 escape rooms times a few thousand a month is still only in the millions i annual revenue. Tiny compared to Google, Facebook, Exxon, etc. Even frozen yogurt was 1.8 billion in 2018.
- jccooper 7y agoThe article is not actually about that. It’s a poorly titled submission.
- neilv 7y agoHas anyone mixed up escape rooms with role-playing, or additional narrative/gimmick? Maybe targeting corporate team-building customers who'll pay a big premium? For example, company signs up for an ostensible corporate off-site retreat meeting that suddenly turns into a team-building (obviously fake) kidnapping. (Blindfolding, and moving to the maze, kidnappers go elsewhere but can be overheard arguing about ransom, then the group manages to untie each other, and try to escape the building, while whispering and evading the occasional guard, time element when they overhear kidnapper threatening to wait only 10 more minutes for ransom call, etc. There could even be a second part, in which the team gets to a dead end, with a cache of laser tag toys, obviously to fight the rest of their way out of the building, and can team-building heal each other when they get hit.) Followed by refreshments, with messages from manager/CEO or product brainstorming, etc. I'm pretty sure the exact above thing would never get past HR at some companies, but I've heard of big-name dotcoms doing questionable parties and team events, so maybe enough companies would pay enough for it?
- lostgame 7y agoI wanted to, but I couldn't keep reading past 'kidnapping', even with the qualifier 'obviously fake'. Any other example might've been better. I would personally not want to take part in such a thing, having been practically kidnapped and sexually assaulted, myself.
- neilv 7y agoI'm very sorry that happened to you. I'm also sorry, I stupidly didn't consider that anyone would've actually been kidnapped before, and wasn't actually thinking about this seriously. (I was thinking of much lighter reasons some customers' HRs might object.) Please disregard the above scenario suggestion.
- lostgame 7y agoI'm not personally offended, I'm just making a definitive point that obviously there might be some other ideas that might work. I appreciate your sympathies. Life sucks sometimes.
- dreamcompiler 7y agoWhen I first saw one of these I went inside and asked what the deal was. I immediately wanted to try it out as a challenge to myself, but then they told me it was really meant for groups. Silly introvert me.
- sixothree 7y agoYou can join a group if they haven't bought all of the slots. It helps if there are two of you but not totally required.
- elcomet 7y agoI don't think that would work. Usually people go with a group of friends or coworker so you can't just join a random group.
- dreamcompiler 7y agoYou can with the ones in my town.
- astura 7y agoYou can at the one in my town if the group isn't full. Last time I went we were only a group of four so we had a couple join us.
- sixothree 7y agoI've been to five location in my city. For all of them you book the room by slots. If you don't buy all the slots, people can join. If you want the entire room, you need to buy all of the slots.
- dreamcompiler 7y agoTo an introvert that's a bug, not a feature ;-)
- k__ 7y agoI think they should be bigger and the stories longer. 1h isn't nearly enough to get in the mood, especially of they have good a story but you don't really have the time to read it.
- personjerry 7y agoEscape rooms are NOT big business because a) no repeat business and more importantly b) they scale terribly.
- GarrisonPrime 7y agoIn general I agree escape rooms aren't a great business. But consider: (a) Although you can't really get repeat business until you create a new game, as long as you have at least 2 different games available at any one time a single group can trigger a cascade of business. It only takes one person from that group wanting to come back to play your other game, and quite often they'll bring new people. Then, if at least one of them comes back to do the first room, they'll bring new people as well. Etc. And of course, whenever you do get around to creating a new game the cycle can repeat. (b) If you want to spend big bucks to make Hollywood-quality games in big cities, yeah you're not going to scale well. But if you create "generation 1" games (basically a series of padlocks, most needing a number or letter code) put them in everyday, contemporary settings, and focus on serving large suburbs and smaller towns, you can scale relatively well. Out of the 7 games I've created thus far, the most popular ones were the quickest and cheapest to build as they took place in a grandmother's home and a generic business office. Quite easy to find relevant decor and furnishings dirt cheap. Yeah, escape rooms are not "big business". But I think what's impressing people is the ROI given the relatively minimal start-up capital and low overhead costs. I only spent $4,700 starting up my escape room business and in its first three years grossed over $100,000 in a tiny mountain town of only 17,000 people. While that isn't gangbusters, it's not bad for a little 20 hours a week side gig.
- knowaveragejoe 7y agoSeconded on the scaling aspect. This company has 39 locations, mostly in medium sized cities. Granted, they are the "generation 1" type games, at least at the one location I've been to. https://breakoutgames.com/ https://breakoutgames.com/
- 40acres 7y agoEscape rooms are great as a social work outing -- I never expected my manager to belt out a shrill shreak after a dead hand dropped out of a safe after we solved a complex puzzle.
- grawprog 7y agoI've only been to an escape room once. It was a birthday gift. It was pretty awesome. There were 5 of us. We had an Alice in wonderland themed room, well three rooms in total. It was a lot of fun, we all worked together, as far as i remember each of us ended up solving at least one puzzle. It was like a real life co op point and click adventure game. I'd definitely recommend it at least once if you can get a small group together.
- prawn 7y agoI always thought an angle to try on these was to turn the escape room inside out. Instead of paying rent, get old cars/buses and build an experience where people had to get in rather than out. Something you could relocate to another city or take out to kids parties. Have components in the trunk, under seats, in roof capsules, glove boxes. I’m sure bus-based ones have been done, but I haven’t heard of retro-fitting junk cars.
- mycall 7y agoMy favorite version was Cube Zero.