Part 3 Interview with Ken Jones

Ken Jones always has a thoughtful look on his face when talking to customers and it is not because he is daydreaming. Ken always makes sure that if he doesn’t have the answer or the solution to a problem he will get right to work finding a solution. Ken often works late and, even when he is playing a game himself, won’t hesitate to help a customer.

[Nathan Murray] First question: what was the inspiration for Gamerz?
Well it was a combination of a couple of things. First, I’m a gamer, and one of the things that always used to frustrate me was I’d play online (I’m a very competitive person), and this was in COD3, COD2, Halo. When you play online you’re subject to lag, and the guy who didn’t have the lag had an advantage. He’d skate all over the screen. Some people had lag switches. They’d throw on the lag switch, skate around a corner, kill you, turn off the lag switch and you never saw them. It drove me and my clan nuts! I got really frustrated with that, and I knew if we were on a LAN there’d be no lag, everyone would have he same situation. I wanted a competitive environment where everyone would be equal, where we could take the lag factor out of it. It’d be a situation where true skill comes into play, it wouldn’t just be against a guy with a slower connection. So that was one of the main inspirations for Gamerz.
The other is that I love gaming, and I always wanted a job where I could play video games. And with this job I get to do that, everybody who works here does, because that’s part of the job. You have to know the games and learn then. Every employee here gets to learn the games—for every 20 hours of work you get a free hour of game time. They can also come in and play online for free, which is a nice perk. At night when there are no customers here, they can play when they’re done with their work. It boils down to I just love videogames.

[Nathan Murray] ok, cool. So how do you conduct business? What’s your business model?
Whew, that’s broad. Haha, let’s see, so the question is what are all your trade secrets? [laughs]

[Nathan Murray] No, no, just generally how are things run around here?
Well, very basically we rent time on systems. That’s the basic premise. We have TVs, Xboxes, Wiis. We package those things together as a system, and customers rent those systems. We charge a different rate depending on the size of the screen. Software comes with the rate for the screen, you can change games as often as you like, so that’s a fairly high level view of what we do. We found that a significant portion of our business come from birthday parties, and outside events. Like this morning, I was at an Army recruiting tournament that we ran for them. We kind of ran it together, but it was our equipment and our processes. We brought the copies of the game and set it up. Occasionally we do that for schools, and dances. Like last year Reynoldsburg had the Tomato Festival, and we were there advertising ourselves. We were there for the Reynoldsburg Halloween Festival. We’re doing a company party here in town, we’re taking 17 TVs, 7 Xboxes, 5 Wiis, we’re going to set them up in a theatre arrangement on a stage and people can come up and play it as part of the company party event.

[Nathan Murray] So Gamerz is mobile?
Yeah, we take our show on the road so to speak. There’s limitations—we can’t take all our systems obviously, it’s just not very practical, so this will be one of the bigger ones we’ve done where we take 7 gaming stations basically. And they only wanted certain games, 5 or 6 games, so we don’t have to bring ...