Next, we have the issue of "Why don't you find a bar to play in. We did" This quote actually illustrates the problem for us quite well:
Quote:
Yet we were able to approach Red Fox by saying, "We have about 15-20 people--often more--who are guaranteed to come here every Tuesday night and order food and drinks if you subscribe to Buzztime."
And if that were the situation here, if we had 15-20 or more people guaranteed to patronize a place every week, we could not argue against this for a second.
But we don't. Even more importantly, this is not due to post-COVID shrivelling.
We never have. No New York area team ever has. The old Nickelodeinn team might have approached 15. 8-12 was the usual NYC group, and we are not unique. Most competitive premium game teams have around that number, maybe a little more, if only because relatively few locations have more than 15 boxes.
Back in the late Nineties, I came up with a rough and ready formula to determine whether this game made financial sense for a place: take the monthly rental and double it: do you spend that much in the place? While doubling may not be sufficient in real-life situations, if you don't spend that much, you certainly aren't spending enough to cover the expense.
I have used that formula over the past quarter-century to judge the viability of locations. The only place I've been associated with in that time that might have met the test was the old Nickelodeinn back in their heyday, and that was only because some of them would play and drink until the wee hours.
That was mostly because there wasn't a mob of people playing premium, and few if any playing the other games. Mad River had two people other than us who would play somewhat regularly.
While the situation in New York was probably worse than the average, the sad fact is Buzztime doesn't make financial sense for most locations, which is why most locations drop it. Part of the reason why Buzztime couldn't make money over the years was because of the high churn rate; they had to spend a lot money to get new places to replace the old places. BWW propped up the number count when they forced all their locations to have the game, but when that ended, the number of BWW Buzztime locations dropped from 1200 to 6. It looks like the new owners have given up on that and are now depending on players to do their recruiting for them.
Back to us, what could we say to a prospective location? Hello, we want you to spend $500 a month to get this game for us. About 8 of us will show up, have a few drinks, and maybe have a meal. We'll show up one/two nights a week. You won't make enough from us to cover that tab, but we're nice people.
You might say, "Well, overestimate," but when the bills come in and the people don't, who will be around to be blamed? Us.
It would make more sense for us to get a location of our own except:
1) Buzztime doesn't normally sell to individuals
2) At least some of us would still use remote and hybrid play to our location
3) If Buzztime ever competently handled the GPS spoofing issue, it would knock out our remote players who were paying to play that way.
This is quite a predicament, but not a unique one. Go to the Buzztime Facebook page, and the number one comment there is "We have no place to play"
and the answer from both Buzztime and faux Fellowship is that of the three monkeys, with a sizable portion of "I got mine, Jack" as a side dish from the Red Skulk.