This article was kindly submitted by Woolie “ThirtyHitCheapz” Madden, community organizer, tournament director and color commentator for Montreal Street Fighter.  When I found out recently about their innovative method of building a Street Fighter community in their area without a traditional arcade, I had to know more and that you guys would get some ideas on how to do the same in your area, since that’s one of the questions that I get asked a lot.  Do you think you can use this model as a template for building a community in your own area?  If so, please post in the comments!  Thank you to Woolie for the article, looking forward to seeing what MTLSF does next!

–gootecks

Building a local Street Fighter community from the ashes of fallen arcades is an immensely difficult task. Keeping one alive and organized is an even greater challenge. The payoff, however, becomes immediately apparent when everyone comes together, leveling up, making noise and that electricity in the air can be felt: We do it for the hype.

Still, the way is paved with obstacles and roadblocks that can kill the momentum necessary to keep a Street Fighter movement alive. By far, the largest of these obstacles is the venue issue. We’ve learned from various community success stories like Keystone II and The Box Arena that with a large, generous benefactor, it can happen. But what about when there isn’t a massive donation to get things started?

Up here in Montreal, we’ve seen one console arcade after another come and go, unable to make that transition into a profitable business. We’ve suffered the community crippling effects of instability and downtime periods caused by not having a venue to play at every week. So when it came time for MTLSF (The Montreal Street Fighter community) to find a new home, we had our homework done. What started long ago as small gatherings of 20 in a sports lounge to play Vanilla SF4 had now become a much larger beast that needed it’s own dedicated space. We decided that the most sensible move was to create our own location to play. But not as a business – as a club.

What we realized over time about a console arcade is, in our area at least, if you have a central downtown location, inside of a net café, and perhaps a ton of copies of Halo and Modern Warfare, then you might be able to make a profit. Otherwise, it simply wasn’t going to happen, and no one fighting game community was going to change that in the long run. Even with support from Tekken, Smash Bros, Soul Calibur and BlazBlue communities, the income just wasn’t enough to keep it going. We realized that basically, we had to forget about profit, and instead look at stability and self sustainment as a basis.

With a little footwork we soon found a loft, sizable to our needs and affordable, in a good location, with all utilities included. We christened it MTLSF HQ, then sat down and had a think about how to go about running a club in the most cost efficient manner. The structure that we came up with was 3 price points for all players: Founders, Monthly members, and walk-ins.

Founders are the crux of the establishment. These members would contribute the largest amount, and would essentially be paying directly into the rent. The rate is relative depending on the number of active members in a given community – it shouldn’t astronomical if there are only a handful of players. But with a healthy population, it can be anywhere from 20% to 33% of the venue’s rent. In our case that turned out to be $200. In return, these founding members would be guaranteed a minimum of six months access, all day, any day, with no venue fees for tournaments. This way, it only takes 3 to 5 active players to cover the rent, and with 20-30 of these subscriptions, it becomes easy to cover a half year and beyond. If the money collectively contributed by the founders extends beyond six months, then so does the founder’s subscription, giving additional incentive. Of course, this excess should also be used towards the cost of getting consoles, setups and sticks.

Founders are also the core group of people that are also asked to volunteer as staff. There’s no hard rule about it, but chances are, the local dedicated players a friends, and can call each to open up and close the venue, and sort of manage things. The tricky part about the founder’s deal however is that all founder’s have to be on the same membership schedule, so that their next re-up months down the line comes in all at once, keeping that rent going without risking a gap for any months. Our solution to this was to have the deal available for the 1st month only, after which point, the next opportunity would be half a year or more from now, whenever the initial membership is up.

The second pricing point for the club is the monthly member. This ends up resembling gyms, martial arts classes and other standard clubs in that it’s a monthly fee that grants all access benefits as well, except obviously limited to one month. The price range for this was based on two factors: One, the amount that casual Street Fighter players are comfortable paying on a weekly basis, and two, an amount that isn’t unfair to amount the founders paid averaged over 6 months. Because the hardcore players of the scene are likely to become founders, the monthly deal is to appeal to casual players who are interested in getting better, and want to step it up from occasionally coming out for some games offline. At our previous venue, a console arcade business that we would rent out, MTLSF had 2 meet-up days per week when casual players showed up more than any other days, and it would cost them anywhere from $10 to $20 per week. Factoring this together with the fact that founders are paying average $33 a month, the logical amount to for a monthly membership to us was $40. Whatever the amount ends up being, it shouldn’t be an aggressive number. To a casual player, two twenty dollars bills is simple and doesn’t feel gouging. The collective amount generated by the monthly members should be enough to further help out with setup fees, getting some consoles, sticks and copies of SSF4.

Finally, there are the walk-ins. Monthly members sometimes decide to come out for a Friday night and bring a few friends to play with. Sometimes a player is just passing through town wants to scope the local competition out. $5 for the night, cheap, fair, and again, non-aggressive. This could be $10 is the venue is massive and looks like it’s worth it, but shouldn’t be anything beyond say, door cover charge for a live show. The walk-in cover money also contributes towards petty cash, setups, Internet bills if you have them, and things like that. There will always be a constant stream of walk ins, and so far we’ve collected more from this than from monthly members.

We’ve been able to afford many things since that help out with the clubspace: A couple of second hand arcade cabinets, a mini-fridge with snacks and beer, some couches, and miscellaneous furniture. With these 3 solid source of constant income, and the main goal being stability instead of profit, we’ve been able to create a self sustaining Street Fighter community venue. It’s a place we can rely on for our growth. While we encourage new blood and casual players to join the group, we’re not relying on them to survive. The tourney players that can be found in any city, the ones that used to pump quarters into cabinets every weekend, are the founders. These players, organized together, are all it takes as a baseline. Everyone who comes out to play beyond that, at least financially speaking, is gravy. It’s a model that I can say works, with confidence. I encourage you to get a little movement started in your area, to begin organizing the building blocks of a scene, and then sit back and let the hype take over.

Woolie “ThirtyHitCheapz” Madden is a community organizer, tournament director and color commentator for Montreal Street Fighter. His email is wooliemadden(AT)gmail(DOT)com. For more info about MTLSF HQ and the Canadian Street Fighter scene, visit http://www.mtlsf.com/.