New section: Getting into the exit games business

"Come in we're Open" graphicThis site is happy to open a major new section, detailing its theories and conclusions about running an exit game.

This is, of course, extremely presumptuous as the people behind it have never actually run one. Nevertheless, having paid attention to sites’ operations, there are enough commonalities and good practice available to be observed that it would appear to be useful to try to draw them all together into a single document. The advice within can never be more than just suggestions, and there are many famous quotes about just how little advice can be worth. Hopefully it can be taken in the sense of “food for thought”, and give both potential market entrants and existing players some suggestions. The majority of points within should be globally applicable, though there are a few that are more specific to the UK and Ireland.

Corrections, suggestions for improvement and other comments from site operators are especially welcome and will be gratefully received; please send them through by e-mail. If any of the advice looks positively harmful, please shout up at once. It’s a living document which will be updated from time to time; many thanks to those site operators who have provided their opinions on an earlier version of it already.

8 thoughts on “New section: Getting into the exit games business”

  1. “excellent service and an uninspired room beats uninspired service and an excellent room every time.”
    I might be a minority in this, but I’d be okay with poor service with an excellent room. I’m much less impressed by excellent service with a poor room. It might have to do with the overall landscape of Toronto escape rooms. There are many friendly owners out there with crap rooms!

    1. Well, you got me there! Evidently “every time” is an exaggeration. Thank you! 🙂

      At a wild guess, is it possible that more discerning, experienced visitors are likely to prioritise room quality more highly than customer service?

      1. It’s entirely possible! I am completely aware that I am an outlier of a customer when I go to any of these places. I think it’s more of a personal reflection than anything ; I don’t really mind eating at restaurants with great food but shitty service either.

      2. I think that’s fair. For first time customers (and as you point out, that’s the majority, at the moment at least) it’s about the whole experience, it’s a cool new thing for your group, you want to be looked after and so on. Once you’ve done a few rooms… that can change.

        That being said, I think the customer service approach should change based on your customers, and can be a different sort of value add for those more geeky about this sort of thing. Doing ClueQuest’s Plan 52 just after it opened, and we’d told them we were returning customers… after we (just) beat the game, they walked us through the room, asked what we liked and didn’t like, what was tough or easy, told us about some of the tweaks they’d made already or were thinking about… a peek behind the scenes as it were, which as very cool. Likewise at Escape Rooms, we mentioned we’d done other rooms before, and had a nice chat about how their game differed and the design and so on. So even for us outliers, good customer service can really help the experience. Just its sometimes different than taking your photo and serving you tea.

        1. Beautifully expressed; that looks very perceptive and specific, and inspires a further round of additions to the customer service section of the document shortly down the line.

  2. Perhaps the advantages of not running an escape game business is that we can go out and explore as much as we can. The experience and information we get can be valuable to the escape game operators, this is something we learned after we started the blog. We didn’t expect to be doing something good for the operators, too, like market intelligence. We find that the game operators are mostly eager to hear from us how others are doing, they may not have chance to explore the games by other operators. Or maybe they want to know how well they are doing themselves, in terms of the games, the business model, customer service, location etcetc. We do think that some of them didn’t do enough research before they go into the business, and hence struggling to sustain now.

    1. I love reading review blogs and think they have a valuable place to play in the fandom; as well as being great fun, which is easily sufficient justification alone if justification were needed, they present the sort of specific customer advice that a more general reviewer could never provide. Anything that can help people find the right exit game for them has got to be a tremendous boon, and anything that can help spread good practice can only give operators valuable feedback.

      The reason why I have shied away from reviews here, as valuable as they can be, is that I have such admiration for anyone who can at all meet the so many different demands that are required to get an exit game up and running in the first place, even if the contents of their room might be uninspired. I want to see the exit game industry thrive, and part of that is being excited by the new sites and games that are coming, and thinking about the scope for things to grow yet further still, and the ways in which we might be pleasantly surprised by things we had never previously considered. As much as it would be fun to live in a country with a hundred different sites, there comes a point where the maxim “quality, not quantity” must take over. And yet we already have more of both than I would have expected even just months ago!

    2. That is such a gripe of mine! I don’t think every room escape proprietor has to visit every other, but it really couldn’t hurt to visit a few of the better ones to see what they’re doing right

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