If you're in SF and build it custom, you can make some money. If you are in a random place with low rent and you buy an off the shelf game, you can make a ton.
If anyone is interested in building one and has questions, ask away!
How’s the best way to measure if the market is saturated?
Books are completely indefensible. There are billions of the things, and new ones get written all the time. I made some money. I was and am very happy to have written books.
Is writing books a good business? Perhaps not, if viewed through the “The world is divided into unicorns and NOOPs” lens. But I don’t look at the world through that lens.
See also: Making music, opening a social pub, running a day care, organizing festivals or conferences...
If those 5 have gotten enough people to come, most of their patrons will happily come do yours, too. You're not really "competing". In a way, you're more like a movie than a movie theater.
Could escape rooms go on tour like theatrical productions? Producers swap escape room teams/spaces between cities? Professional roadies who are expert in setup/teardown?
There's also many companies that sell escape room plans. So rather than creating your own, you'd spend $5-10k to "buy" one and then build it yourself. They usually guarantee a X-mile radius that you'll be unique, so that you aren't competing against the same game.
The escape room in my town reconfigures every once in a while, I've done about 5 different "rooms" there that have all been very different. Sometimes the theme requires you to know something about the topic to solve the room (examples: star wars room, comic book room). To be honest they probably rotate the rooms.
Also, if there are more than about 13 in your market, you’re going to have problems getting noticed because the review sites have huge first mover bias.
In general, the market is over saturated, and will probably see more closures than openings over the next year.
1- Are you making profit? How long did that take you to be profitable?
2- In what do your spend money? Mind sharing a breakdown?
3- Who is your typical customers? Do they come back? How do you reach them?
Most people I know did it with some other people from work. Also myself, somebody at work asked and we went with around 10 people to a place with two rooms.
you can literally play the “same” room hundreds of times. how about designing the room and having your friends bash their heads against the wall. this space is ready for disruption!!!
Best comparison point I can think of are roguelikes, but even if you can figure out a way to make custom hardware build-out easy, roguelikes largely work by making replayability cheap. It's hard to build an on-ramp to teach players about the interactions of complex systems when each playthrough costs them $50+ and takes an hour plus transpotation time.
I think you underestimate the skill and time it requires to make engaging puzzles.
The big chains will solve the repeatability issue by swapping puzzles around their world locations. I assume they are doing this already.
1/ The up-front costs were $30k for me, and it took about 8 months to make it back. After operating costs, I make anywhere from $1k to $5k/mo. (Once in a while I lose money)
2/ I want to do a real blog post, but high level: $3.5k rent, $2k for a manager, $2k for labor, $1k for other utilities, and then money on things like adwords, etc.
3/ They would come back, except we only have one room! On weekends we get a lot of tourists, on week days we get a lot of team bonding from startups and larger companies. So, while they don't come back, their coworkers tend to. (This is atypical for most escape rooms in the US, though. Most have 3-5 rooms, and very few "company outings".)