GosuGamers Barcraft World Tour

Tell us a bit about yourself.
My name is Brandon, I’ve lived in Buffalo, NY my entire life. Turning 24 years old soon and I’m a software developer. I live with a friend who’s also a software developer and we decided to bring this Barcraft thing to Buffalo. We’ve been talking about it for a while, and found that the closest event to us is in Toronto Canada which is 2 hours away so we figured we’ll have a Barcraft of our own.

So how was the start?
We were into SC2 to begin with, played from day one, love the community. We watched big events and saw stuff at home, inviting people over to watch MLG and IPL. It kinda just rolled from there, we heard about barcrafts and decided to try.

The first thing we had to do - research. Before we pitch the idea to a bar owner we need to come prepared. Here’s what we wanna do and here’s how well we think it’ll do. We brought it to The Sidebar’s owner and he liked the idea. Unfortunately the championships are always on Sundays and the bar doesn’t open on Sundays - so we decided to charge 20 dollars to get in and people can drink whatever they want. We think that’s a pretty good deal.

Ideally we don’t want to charge people to get in, we just don’t have that option just because we have to guarantee the bar makes the return. They have to physically open the bar on Sunday and staff it for us. We don’t own the bar and we have nothing to do with it except being regular customers so we can’t open the bar ourselves.

To counter some of that cost, we kinda convinced the bar owner to let people drink all they can. That works for the bar and people seem to like the idea. You get a few people who drink a good amount and some that only get one beer, everyone’s happy.

Does the entire amount go to the bar or do you get a cut?
We choose to not take a cut, it sucks a little bit that we don’t since it’s expensive and time consuming to run a barcraft but we decided not to. We originally wanted 30 dollars per head, cause 6 hours of free drinking is a lot, but we managed to reduce it to just 20. If we wanted to take a cut, we couldn’t reduce it to 20. We make back the money it costs us to run the event on raffle tickets and we also sell pizza for 1 dollar a slice.

Raffles you say? Got any sponsors that help you with that?
We get a lot of raffle stuff from local places. There’s a local game change place called Oogie Games and they donate gift cards for the raffle. They have giant game rooms and they charge about 200 for 20 people for 2 hours, and they give us a certificate for those parties and we raffle those off. We get 1 or 2 every single event. They also give us free things for customers. We like giving a little something for everyone who walks in, so people will feel good. We get 5 dollars gift certificates or stickers and stuff like that.

In the past we’ve gotten prizes donated from a few other industry sponsors like computer cases and mice. We actually decided to get away from those big industry sponsors. If we get a computer case donated or a graphics card, the chances of someone who gets to actually use it is kinda slim - not a lot of people build their own computers. A lot of people don’t even play SC2 and aren’t big gamers, so we try and get things anyone cand use, like flash drives.

Another local sponsor is Unyts - an organ, blood and tissue donation place. They run blood drives in the area similar to things the Red Cross does, but Unyts is specific to New York so whatever they get stays in this community. We know someone who works for them, and that’s how we ended up pitching the idea and they like it so they came on board. We use them to reach a different demographic than our 20-30 year old crowd. They’ve given us actual funding, we were able to use this money to purchase a wireless audio video setup which allows us to stream to the entire bar with no wires. They also give us a lot of stuff to give away like keychains, stickers, and papers on how to donate. It’s a big issue for us to push the local thing, we’re trying to keep all our sponsors local.

We also have a Tattoo shop called Arboreal Ink as a sponsor. We got in contact with them about a month ago. The owner of the shop has been coming to our events since we started. He contacted us last month and asked if we would like to get some gift cards to his shop. For the last event he donated a bunch of 25 dollar cards towards a tattoo or something like that.

Our last sponsor is called Zotac - they make mini computers and they donated a computer to us. This computer we use to stream all our events and it’s nice cause before we were using our own laptops and we can’t really leave it there in the bar. Now we have a dedicated computer for barcrafts and we can just keep it at the bar on Fridays and Saturdays. The bar has a good number of TVs so we can stream our stuff on some of it. If there’s a playoff or a big sports event they’ll obviously want to stream that but if we manage to work something with the bartender - that he’ll see an increase in customers if he’ll let us put up SC2, that might work.

What are your thoughts on other types of events such as running tournaments, connecting to other Barcraft events and in general growing as a community.
We’ve talked about running tournaments but that might be a little out of our scope. We have no place to run a tournament and no hardware to actually do it. It’s not definite but it’s something we would potentially want to do.

I have exchanges with other barcrafts but there are no events that I can physically communicate with because we’re so far away. We do talk about how we run things and how everyone is doing and share ideas.

There are a lot of goals we wanna reach. The first thing for us is make running barcrafts a little more automated. It’s gotten easier to run since we got more equipment but it’s still a lot of work. You’re doing promotion, you have to make sure all your hardware is working all the time, that the backups are working. We’re not quite there yet. Our immediate goal is to automate as much as we can, and our next goal is to get people on Fridays and Saturdays like I explained earlier.

We all have full time jobs, and I’m getting married soon. We all have these things in our lives and running these events takes time. We don’t do it for the money, and it does cost money and takes a lot of effort. We had to purchase a lot of cables and hardware to get things running. The day of an event we have to make sure everything is working, get to the place hours before the event and make sure it runs smoothly. It’s a big time thing. Before most events we go meet up with our sponsors, letting them know how we’re doing and see if they wanna give us more stuff to raffle off and how we can help each other.

Sounds like you’re doing very well despite the time constraints, got any advice to people dealing with the same issues?
The things we struggle with mostly is really just our time constraints. Make sure you have the time to run these things. It’s a commitment and you’re committing to the community when you’re doing something like this. Also - make sure you get help. Volunteers are a big reason we can still do this, if we didn’t have the number of volunteers we got there is no way we would still be running barcrafts right now.

Thank you very much Brandon, anything else you’d like to say?
I’d just like to thank all our sponsors - Oogie Games, Unyts, Arboreal Ink, and Zotac. The Sidebar for hosting us and all our amazing volunteers.


Run a barcraft event? Leave us a comment with a facebook link and we’ll contact you.



This is a GosuGamers weekly feature by Eyal "KOKOStern" Stern, that is published every Wednesday.