Additional Revenue Streams - Roundtable Discussion // Takeaways

In June a dozen of escape room owners gathered for an online roundtable discussion about additional revenue streams. We had owners from the US and the UK and we shared our experience and best practices about generating extra income with add-ons, merch and new business arms.

Just like the ‘Future of Escape Rooms’ roundtable and the ‘Networking & Partnerships’ roundtable we had a lively conversation about ideas and how to implement them.

Escape Room Add-Ons

The first topic the group discussed were add-ons and upselling items you can add to existing bookings. I started out the topic with ideas that we do at my escape room and things that we have tried with my consulting clients. Then the group added their own ideas and best practices.

Celebration packs

This is a great option for bachelor and bachelorette parties, anniversary games and even birthday games. Only your imagination is the limit to what you can include in something like this but here are some ideas: Bottle of champaign, Exit or simiar game, printed photo of the team, a place to drink the champaign in and decoration in the room

This can also include a custom puzzle for their game. Ideally you should create a puzzle that’s easy to modify with a picture, birth date, etc. The more custom the puzzle the more you can charge.

Proposal Games

This became quite the phenomenon in the escape room world but many owners don’t charge anything extra for these type of games. You should. Of course doing these games for regular pricing is you prerogative.

I would suggest that you charge extra and come up with different packages for proposal games. At the end of the day this is extra work for you and your team so it’s an extra service.

Party Bags

You are not going to break the bank with this one but every little helps to support your bottom line. There is only a one time set up cost to figure out the content of the party bag and the next time you get this email

‘Hi there

I have 12 thirteen year olds and I’m organising a birthday party. What can you offer?

Best,

Organiser Parent’

You can respond to them:

‘Hi Organiser Parent,

We would love to host you and the kids for an awesome birthday event. We also have birthday packs for only $9 each. See the photo attached for the contents.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Best,

Your Escape Room’

Even if you only make $3 on each pack, your team has plenty of time to assemble the packs in thei downtown keeping them busy and if you sell 200x packs in a year that’s $600 that you wouldn’t have had without. Win-win, Not to mention that kids bring these home and they work as a reminder.

Also consider creating a corporate gift pack especially if you get a lot of team buildings.

Function Rooms

You might think that you don’t have any function rooms. Your escape rooms and your lobby can actually double up as a space for cutting a birthday cake or to hold a meeting. Some escape rooms are a pretty neat meeting backdrop if you ask me and you can easily charge an extra $100 per hour for something like this.

Offer this as an optional add-on can help you convience groups who are looking for venue that can tick multiple boxes for them.

Limited Edition Games

A lot of owners create brand new seasonal rooms which is a legit strategy to sell out that room for that season but a different approach is simply changing or dressing up a room. This approach was backed by multiple participants of the roundtable as a succesful one to up your sales.

clueQuest turned it’s 4x PLAN52 games into a limited edition Christmas room

Periodically you can turn your games into special edition rooms to boost the sales of that room and you can also charge extra. Last Christmas we redecorated one of our rooms and changed the story and the rooms outsold our rooms during December.

Another idea from a London owner was to add scare actors to your rooms during October. Since it is a special event you can charge 20-30% extra for the tickets during this period and you are also upping your chances to sell out the room. This activity also landed free PR coverage by local media.

Filming Crews, Youtubers and Influencers

Another roundtable participan shared their experience with letting their space to filming crews during quiet times. This is a great option for you if you have nice looking sets and a closed on certain days or have slow days during the week.

What you can charge for something like this will depend hugely on the production budget but you can expect money in the range of thousands. You can also let your place for Youtuber, insta influencers and let them use your space and cool backdrop for their content. If they have the rigt audience you can even give them a discount in exchange for a namedrop.

Another participant added that they’ve let their place to bands to shoot ther music videos in the building.

This opportunity will rarely find you on it’s own however so you should go after this more actively using your network.

Additional Business Arms

The next topic the group discussed was adding new formats to your escape rooms and growing completely new departments that can generate revenue.

Going Outdoor

Not a new idea on the market but definitely one that’s worth attention especially now a days as we are in the state of the industry where diversification is crucial for long term success of escape rooms.

clueQuest’s outdor game, Glitch Hunters was created in Questy

The upsides of going outdoor:

• One time development cost of the game. Mostly your time.

• No upkeep cost of staff, rent or utility bills.

• Expand into nearby towns and neighbourhoods.

There are specialised softwares for building outdoor games:

• Questy: A new contender on the market with features like automated hint system, interactive building blocks and a wide range of styling and branding options

• ClueKeeper: A software that’s been around for a while. It has location tracking and a more basic builder that gets the job done.

• Cluetivity: This is a ready made game that you can licence. The main downside of this game is that you have to dispense bags to the groups which they need to return.

Portable Games

Also not a new idea on the market but a very valid option non the less to strenghten your business with a new arm. There are different approaches to this but here are some of them discussed during the roundtable:

• Corporate teams: Build or get a few mobile units that you can offer to coporate clients so you can go to their office and entertain their staff on-site. This is a great way in with companies which then can be turned into regualr customers. One participant with a large coporate clientele reported that their record revenue was $25,000 from just portable games in a month.

• Weddings: Let’s say that you are located in an area that has plenty of wedding venues and your summers are a bit slow. You can reach a brand new audience while you are making money.

• Festivals and Fairs: These can work as simple marketing for your escape room but if you are charging for the experience then you can make additional revenue.

Adding mobile options is especially good if you have down seasons where you have staff but no games for them to run. If you can find the market that is willing to pay you to come to them during these times you can fill up your calendar.

Adding New Formats

Even though the ER market looks like it peaked for now, immersive entertainment is still on the rise. And with that there are new formats popping up all the time. Here are some of the games discussed by the group that you can add to your venue:

• PXL Game: It is essentially the modern version of floor is lava with different game modes. The game runs itself so you don’t need to man the station.

• Arcade Arena: This game offers interactive gameplay with projections on three wals. Player can select from different games and they have a growing game library

• QuizBoxing: A fun new concept from France where people are not only competing against each other but they can also sabotage the other teams. This concept has great potential with corporates and friend groups. Indestroom launched it’s own version: Quizy

• Valomotion: A pretty decent go at mixed reality gaming. Although the animations look a bit choppy at the time of writing, games like this will definitely carve out their own spot in the immersive markets.

If you are adding a new format to your venue make sure that it has the potential to attract customers on it’s own and that it has the potential to drive new customers to you escape rooms.

+1 Supplying Other ERs

You can actually become a supplier to other escape rooms. If you’ve been around the industry for a while you’ve definitely developed some speciality skills. Whether that’s construction, game design, booking software or game hardware you are certainly an expert in at least one ER supplier worthy skill.

Here are some success stories of escape rooms owners turning towards supplying other ERs:

• Indestroom: Alex started out as an owner himself more than a decode ago when he turned towards building turnkey rooms. Now they own one of the largest escape room factory in the world.

• COGS: The three owners of COGS also started out as owners back in the day. Now their hardware and software runs thousands of experiences around the world including some big ones like Phantom Peak.

• Questy: This software was born out of necessity during COVID for our play at home games. After 3 years of development and the system managing over 30,000 games we’ve decided to make it available to other ER owners, who want to design their own outdoor or play at home escape game.

Merch, Board Games & More

The final topic for the roundtable was merch items. Since the first two topics took up most of the time we only had 10 minutes to dicsuss.

The main conclusion of this section was that you should automate this as much as possible and have a good selection of merch, such as:

• Photo options with their team photo

• Memorabilia like mugs, pins, water bottles and notebooks

• Board games and play at home escape games

• T-shirts, hoodies and clothing - This might be the most hassle due to keeping inventory of different sizes.

• Confectionery and soft drinks

Although at first sight these might not worth the hassle as you have to restock them and they only earn you a small amount of money. Look at it this way: If these items make you $200 per month in profit that’s almost $2,5k in a year. It’s a no brainer, especially if one of your managers are in charge and you don’t have to spend time with this.

Summary

It is clear that developd escape room markets are getting saturated and we are in the long game now where escape rooms businesses have to diversify their offering and maximise their profits.

Don’t look at these ideas about additional revenue for your escape room as a to do list but as a inspirational list of things you could be doing to help you bottom line and secure the long term future of your escape room.

If you need help figuring out what’s right for your escape room business, reach out to me I would be happy to discuss it in more details.