Every Gaming Business Has a Site. Who Can Book You?

When did you last meet a gaming business without a website?

You can’t name one either, can you? I went looking for them on purpose this year and came back nearly empty handed, because 92.2% of the gaming businesses I sampled have a website, 3 of 47 across the trades I count.

Being findable is the one thing your trade has already got right. It’s also the thing your trade will not stop talking about.

What “we have a website” stopped meaning

Ten years ago, having one was most of the competition, and I built plenty of sites whose entire job was to prove the business existed and hadn’t closed down.

Your trade is past that. Everyone got through the door, so the door itself stopped being worth anything, and the argument moved somewhere nobody in this industry much likes to look.

So what is your website actually for now?

The scoreboard we all use

Sit in on the first call of any project in this industry and count what actually gets discussed.

The homepage video. The logo. Whether the new site feels premium.

How many people joined the Discord this month. Whether the trailer should start playing on its own, which it shouldn’t, but that’s a different argument.

I’ve let half an hour go by on a hero video before anyone in the room said the word booking, and I let it happen because it’s a far nicer conversation than the one I’m about to have with you.

Add the platform to that list while we’re at it. I lost a week trying to make it explain why one gaming room had a great year and the room across town didn’t, and it explained nothing.

None of that is stupid, and a place that looks dead online is dead.

But every one of those things gets scored by people who already work inside the building. Who is scoring the other thing?

Six o’clock on a Friday

Five people in a group chat, and one of them has to produce a plan before the momentum dies, so she’s got about ninety seconds of everyone’s attention and she knows it.

She isn’t reading your About page. She wants four things: are you open tonight, can you fit five of us, what does a couple of hours cost, and can she lock it in without talking to anyone.

Miss one of the four and she moves down to the next name, not because your place is worse, but because her ninety seconds ran out while your homepage was still introducing itself. She’s the bounce rate every owner asks me about, and she was gone before your About page got a look in.

Are all four of those answers on your first screen? Get your phone out and look, because I’d bet a decent lunch that they aren’t.

The box most of you haven’t got

27.6% of gaming sites put a form on the homepage, against 28% of every small business site I audit, so the trade that wins the website check comes out dead average on the check that turns a stranger into money.

Putting one up is a morning’s work for whoever built your site, and the fiddly part isn’t the building at all, it’s deciding what you’re allowed to ask her for.

Name, date, how many people, and a box for anything unusual. Every extra field you add costs you someone who was nearly ready to commit.

She isn’t going to call you instead, either. She’s in a loud room with four other people on a Friday night, and calling a stranger to ask about prices is the most avoidable job in her entire evening.

The lounge that had a website the whole time

A man who runs an esports lounge told me last year that his website was fine, and he was right, in the sense that it existed and looked good and hadn’t broken.

Every booking he got arrived through Instagram messages, which meant every booking he got arrived whenever he next happened to open Instagram.

He answered them at midnight, in bed, one thumb, half asleep. Some he answered two days later, and those groups had already booked somewhere else.

When did you last close a birthday party from under the covers?

I put a form on the homepage in an afternoon and pointed it at an email address his manager reads as well.

Nothing else about the site changed. He stopped negotiating birthday parties at midnight, and his manager started closing them at ten in the morning.

He’d had a website for six years by then. Having one was never the question.

The link that leaves your building

Your trade travels through chat windows more than almost any other one I audit, because Discord servers and group texts are where your customers make their plans in the first place.

68.5% of gaming sites link a social profile, a little ahead of the 66% I get nationally, so most of you have at least pointed at where that conversation is happening.

Then there’s the question of what your address looks like once it lands in the conversation. 76.7% of gaming sites carry Open Graph tags, just over the 75.7% I see across everything I check.

Open Graph tags are half an hour of work for whoever set your site up, and they are the reason a link can land in a chat looking like an invitation rather than a warning. Skip them and your address turns up bare in the middle of the conversation, with nothing on it worth a thumb. Flooring contractors get hit with this in the same shape, where one forwarded link decides whether a stranger sees a floor or a row of characters.

She sent her friends a recommendation and it landed looking like spam. Whose fault will they decide that was?

The question I ask owners first now

Walk me through a booking, start to finish, without you touching it once.

Almost nobody in this trade can do it. The story always breaks at the same point, which is the moment the customer has to reach a human being, and that human being is you, and you’re on the floor fixing a headset.

A website that can’t take a yes is a poster with a hosting bill, and I’ve built a few of those myself before I knew better.

Neither of these is a rebuild

I have to say this part out loud, because I sell new websites for a living and my incentive runs the other way entirely.

A form is a morning. The tags are less than that. Both go on the site you already own, both get done by whoever already has the password, and neither one will ever show up in anybody’s portfolio.

Which is exactly why they’re the two most skipped jobs in your industry, and the two I’d do before I touched anything else.

Tell me gaming is different

Some of you are already writing to me, and a few of you have a case worth hearing.

You’re a walk-in place in a mall. Your players all come off a stream.

Your league books itself and always has. Nobody has ever filled in a form on your site, and you’ve had one since 2019.

Every realtor I meet says that last sentence too, and real estate sits near the top of all 47 trades for putting a form on the homepage while barely believing in the thing.

Fine, but be specific with me. Tell me the last three groups who booked you and how each one of them found you, and if the website never comes into it, I’ll say so in public with your name at the top of it.

Do the check before you write, though. Open your homepage on your own phone, hold it the way she’d hold it in a loud room, and count the taps it takes to say yes to you.

Send me the site if you’d rather I did the counting. Then come and tell me why your corner of this trade is the exception.