Hello, my name is Daniel Ralston, owner of Des Moines Gaming Club. Welcome to the first ever Tuesday Telecast. Every Tuesday we will strive to put out a video here on our YouTube channel that will be shared on our Facebook and Twitter pages. The video will go over news, events, and other interesting information pertinent to the club for the upcoming week. For example, once we are open, the Tuesday Telecast might mention that we will be open for casual play Tuesday through Friday and that there will be a Call of Duty tournament on Saturday. It might also mention news from any sponsors we might have as well as any updates on the business side of things like if new equipment is on the way.
Now, for this first Tuesday telecast since we are not open yet I can’t really go over any upcoming events here at the club. But what I can do is let you know where we are at, a rough timeline of when we will be open and having events, as well as do some explaining around our pricing structure and how our founding membership comes into play.
For anyone who has followed us on Facebook, Twitter, or the people who even filled out that esports survey we did back in the Fall of 2019 and has received emails off of that survey, you know that we have been working on this project for quite awhile. In fact, I’ve personally been working on this for about 3 and a half years and while it’s absolutely crazy for me to look out here past the camera and see just how far we’ve come, it makes me that much more motivated to get this last stretch of work done so that we can finally be open. Back in the summer of this year we were hoping to be open by October 1st. But then COVID-19 kept sticking around and even getting worse. This had a profound effect on the supply chain of the gaming industry because we were not able to get our PCs, monitors, headsets, chairs etc for much longer than we had hoped. Not to mention some of those new gen Xboxes and Playstations that are still extremely hard and costly to get a hold of. Besides the delays from Covid, setting up this club has also taken longer than I had first thought. It’s my first time setting up a gaming center so I’m not all that surprised that my initial estimate was a little over zealous. As I learned from my previous job which was at a large corporation here in Des Moines, things always take longer than you think.
Now, our current timeline sees us having a couple of small launch or “test” events here at the end of January with an actual hard open date of sometime in February.
We will have a couple of new Xboxes and a couple of new PlayStations available when we start having events and I can’t wait to be able to share these with you especially since they have been so hard to obtain.
One last thing I want to touch on is our pricing structure and membership. You can check out our pricing model on our website in the about section but basically we have affordable hourly rates as well as day passes. For casual play, the club plans to be open most days from Noon to 9pm with Sunday hours being a little different and Monday’s being closed and these rates will be for both consoles and PCs. With the day passes, the prices are slightly lower during the week just because we expect to have more traffic during the weekend and less during the week. You will also see that members get reduced day pass prices. What else comes with a membership and how do you become one? it’s available now on our website and when you become a member, you will receive the limited release founding member DMGC t-shirt as well as the commemorative pin with our logo. Along with those items members receive a significant list of benefits including, reduced casual play day passes, access to member only watch parties for big esports events where food and drink will be provided, 30 minutes of free virtual reality at our partner business RezBlue Arena which is located right besides us, and most important of all, members of Des Moines Gaming Club can enter in to any league that we will run. League’s will be developed for our most popular games and will consist of weekly matches. Leagues will likely last for a few months and the winner will be determined by who has the best record, or the most points, at the end of the “season”. A league tournament will also occur for league members during the course of the season. Cash prizes will be awarded and all match play for league matches and league tournament matches will be free. We’ll have more information regarding leagues closer to opening but we are really excited about them because we believe that is the easiest and most accessible way for us to achieve our goal, which is to provide consistent, locally cared-for gaming opportunities for gamers in the Des Moines area. Thank you so much to everyone who has reached out to us, given support, and liked our social media pages. We are so fortunate to be able to be taking this leap and we can’t wait to start here in a few weeks. Happy Gaming!