Business idea: reality quest game

Live quests are story role-playing games that can be played in a closed space, in an open area, and even in nature. And if initially quests were created and conducted mainly on the streets of the city (it's time to remember the same Watch or Encounter), today, in addition to them, you can open quest rooms, and just role-playing story rooms with costumed performances and certain goals in the game .

How business quests in reality also look interesting: the target audience is young people from 20 to 35 with an average income and above who prefer active types of recreation, as well as corporate clients who expect to make friends with the tech department with the help of quests “with those clowns from accounting ". It is most promising to go to regions where they already know about quests, but dominance has not yet been observed - this will help to reach payback in about 3-6 months.

Before we start

In the past few years, re-opening quests in reality and various quest rooms have won the title of one of the most developing areas of the event business - and no crises can stop them. Of course, marketers are a little cunning when they say that in difficult times it is these games with non-standard situations that allow you to forget about everyday life, come to the fore, but there is some truth in every joke. Moreover, this business has an interesting specificity - competitors here do not compete as much as help each other, even if reluctantly: a person is interested in playing the quest only once, and then he starts what else is interesting in the city.

The first step to create your quest is to decide on the format of the game. For example, in quests like escape the room, you need to get out of a locked room, solving various tasks - such quests require more investment in the room and can be both an intellectual game of a competitive nature, and transfer clients to an alternative reality. Another thing is role-playing games with tasks scattered around the city or detective stories when you need to solve a terrible mystery, unravel the case and find the killers, at the same time climbing through garbage dumps, trying to find NPCs, receiving text messages from above and independently determining the further course of the storyline.

By the way, in the growing market every now and then new offers of escape rooms for the franchise appear. Here are the notorious DozoR and Encounter, and the indoor "Claustrophobia", Rabbit Hole, Real Quest, Questime, "Room", "Exit the Room", in general, millions of them. They allow you to work under a well-known name and often not worry too much about script development and automated game systems. Despite the impressive entry fee, entrepreneurs do not complain: the development of the same scripts costs a lot of money and requires thorough testing, and website promotion eats up a lot of time.

Main risks: believing that your business is “for fun”, for rooms it’s a big investment, for city quests it’s dependent on weather conditions, a strong dependence on reputation (suppose you did everything cool for 10 years, and then someone got lost during the quest and that's it, the outflow of customers is guaranteed). 

A nice alternative is to buy a professional escape room kit and set it all up in a much easier way.

Location

With a room in order to create your own quest, everything is simple - you either need it or you don't need it. For example, to open a quest room, you need a decent place with an authentic renovation, which will cost a pretty penny, and in good transport accessibility, perhaps in the center. Role-playing games can be played in an anti-cafe like a common game library, where everyone comes - most often in this situation, you can not even pay rent, but find some kind of compromise that is interesting to both parties. But for city and search quests, as well as away quests, who themselves will come to a wedding, birthday or corporate party with pleasure, a room is not needed or not necessary at first.

Equipment

The basis of every quest, regardless of its type, is a scenario. Scenarios are made on a similar principle as for films and performances. In companies where conducting quests in reality is put on stream, their own team with directors, screenwriters, and editors usually works on creating the next script. You can entrust this work to individual people with experience: you can find such people either through friends or on the good old fl.ru. And if there is patronage from the franchisor, scripts can be provided to you for free or developed for an additional fee.

Usually the script should be based on some kind of mystery or mystery, and the denouement should be logical, but not entirely predictable. It is best when the organizers have several types of plot, which are selected depending on the age, interests of the audience, their experience in games or the presence of certain roles that would equalize the chances of the players.

Personnel

Let's start with you. Since in order to open your quest, you can do without additional hiring of agents - 2-3 organizers are enough - you will need a keen interest. Experience in event companies and at least basic skills as an event leader are also desirable. Scenarios, as we have already said, can be ordered on freelance sites or, for example, arrange a competition on social networks.

In general, the more complex and interesting your quests are, the more non-player characters you will have to connect to them. At first, you can attract acquaintances and hire third-party people, for example, with payment for time. In the future, it is better to form a staff of your own agents, each of which can take part in several quests at once.