Hmm never thought I’d find myself posting in Newbie Sakyo, but I’m not to proud and arrogant to be above asking for advice when I need it. So I want to start hosting a small local scene down here in Atlanta GA. I know we have final round but ( correct me if I’m wrong ) that’s not a daily or weekly thing. So how would one go about this. Do I ask a store owner can I rent out his space for tourney’s? Should I just buy my own? How much money am I looking at for start up? ( Recording equipment, consoles and games, etc? ). I figured the daily on-lin open lobbies I’ll be hosting for Darkstalkers Ressurection would be a start to see how it is to organize something. I know it doesn’t compare to hosting an off line scene, but it’s a start I think.
I’d start by getting a feel for whether or not people in your local area even want to get together on a regular basis to play together. This is best done by checking places like Regional Matchmaking here in the forums (Southern region of course) to see where there’s a demand or not. If you’re lucky, there might be some people gathering on the regular already, and you just need to join in and be part of the group.
If not, you can do things like checking around local game stores, arcades, college campuses that have video game clubs, etc… to get a feel for an idea place to have your venue.
Once that’s started, it’s just a matter of figuring out logistics and advertising it wherever you can. Logistics is things like tables, chairs, power strips, consoles, TVs, game discs, etc… Things that you actually need to play video games. Of course, you’ll need a venue, i.e. a place where you can gather. If you’re not comfortable enough or it’s not feasible to do it at your house, you can look around to local libraries, video game stores, arcades, anywhere that has empty rooms, electrical outlets, and people who are willing to rent out space for you. Advertising is a simple matter of posting it all over common social media sites (facebook, twitter, etc…) as well as posting old school flyers near the physical location where you want to have your event. Be sure to add as many details as you can without making it TOO cluttered, and always include some sort of contact info so that they can reach you directly for more information.
As far as the money situation goes, typically you will charge your players a “venue fee” that goes to the venue owner, yourself, or both, on top of the entry fee you will need to pay out for tournaments. Even if it’s not a tournament, you might want to consider charging players something like $5/person or something like that to cover the venue costs, so that way you’re not shouldering the financial burden 100% on yourself. If it’s a free venue space, then it’s up to you whether or not you want to charge money.
If you’re looking to start a tournament, I’d highly recommend you try starting up a local scene first that’s willing to come together on a regular basis. Once you’ve gotten your feet wet with how that works, and you have a good idea of how many people will show up, then tournaments are the way to go. You’ll want to start small and ignore things like recording stations, stream stations, etc… and just practice getting good at developing or using tournament bracket systems as well as how to efficiently run matches in a row without too much downtime and without burning out your players. It’s a bit of a mix of art and science.