They have deep pockets, and greater ability to borrow. The location today is unprofitable, but they can afford to look out a year and decide to eat losses, expecting to make it up. Small businesses, especially retail, are much more susceptible to cash flow disruption.
They also have economies of scale that let them run at higher margins, so they often will be losing less during tough times because they are spending less.
You can see it in action in almost any trendy neighborhood. Each downturn kills some small shops, and chains survive. A unique shopping district in 2007 now starts looking like an outdoor Westfield Shopping center.
Is the Apple store in Brooklyn closing down because it isn't profitable today? They can sit on the lease for two years with zero revenue if they want. Meanwhile the boutique denim shop or tea house is already out of business 2 months ago.
Distribution of failure probably won’t be worse than before for new entrepreneurs
People with money or access to capital are in a different world than people without
These locations become your PlayStation or game console. You need your own killer content like Zelda or something to get off the ground, but once you can offer development tools that offer access to such a large audience, the entrepreneurs will come and start building content for you.
You provide a set number of props like staircases, blocks, etc that can be arranged into a specific game rooms layout and then painted by the developers game giving you much more room than just a big open area to work with.
There are some really good POC’s out there, but it’s just a single location like a laser tag place servicing a single area. That’s not enough to build a critical mass of developers or players.
The whole space looked like it might have been 1200 square feet.
And as far as I can remember, my brother and I were the only two customers we ever saw in there during weekends and we went at least twice a month until it went out of business