There’s a very admirable but naive sentiment that people without a fighting game local can just start their own. Starting your own local is a tall order and quite frankly, you need to be a crazy person to do it.
Adam Mastroianni wrote a great article about setting your life goals, and he leads with the common fantasy of running a small coffee shop, serving coffee and people watching all day. Mastroianni’s heard this fantasy before, and if he’s feeling a little devilish, he’ll ask the dreamer where they’re going to source their coffee beans from.
He rattles off several other questions revolving around procurement of materials, how the dreamer intends to handle financial transactions, scheduling employee shifts, and so on: they’re realities of running a business. Let’s not even get started with taxes.
I can’t say it any better than Mastroianni himself: “When you fully unpack any job, you’ll discover something astounding: only a crazy person should do it.”
Unless you already have the privilege of having your own large apartment or house where you can use your personal gear and space to entertain and support a small gathering, starting a local is a big undertaking. If you don’t have a house or personal space, you are literally starting a small business. Here’s my FGC take on Mastroianni’s unpacking of “running a local”, and these are just things to think about, not actual solutions to these things:
- Is this viable?
- Do you know how many fighting game players are in your area? Are they of legal-ish age to not require a parent?
- How many players outside of your immediate area would be willing to commute in?
- What game(s) would they specifically be interested in? The zeitgeist game(s) will tend to always bring an audience, certain fighting-adjacent games like Smash Bros will always have a willing audience, sometimes a niche game can thrive in your specific area.
- Where are you setting up?
- Is there a store vacancy you have in mind?
- How much renovation would it need, if any?
- Are you going to enter a partnership with an existing business where they sublet space to you in their establishment?
- Are you and your attendees prepared to play by their rules, not yours?
- Is this location within range of public transport stations, parking?
- Is the area relatively safe? Where’s the nearest fire department, urgent care, hospital, police station?
- Is there food nearby? Will you want or have to sell food, which at bare minimum involves procurement?
- Does the location have a suitable public restroom?
- Does the location have HVAC?
- There’s a lot of money involved
- How do you keep the venue funded? You already need to take care of the lease/rent and any monthly payments on infrastructure (i.e., internet) for the location.
- There’s a lot of hardware involved; how do you deal with damage, theft, and ageing of hardware? How much are you going to insure? Are you going to rent peripherals to customers?
- Are you going to sell products to keep the venue funded? How are you going to get them?
- Is there a market for said products in your area?
- What’s your point of sale system?
- Will you want someone to work as an employee?
- How do you deal with problems?
- How will you institute individual bans of individuals?
- If someone breaks the law, are you ready to be in contact with the police department?
- Do you have or will someone else have emergency health care and/or first aid training?
- Do you have any plans for external burglary, unexpected damages, or inclement weather that hurts your income?
- What do you do if the popular fighting games “suck” and you lose traffic?
- Are you cognizant enough to notice a clique forming in your attendees that hurts sustainability?
- Are you a marijuana friendly establishment?
- Will being marijuana friendly skirt local law?
- Will being marijuana friendly introduce non-contributory, non-fighting-game-player outsiders?
- Are you willing to enforce some kind of rules so no one’s constantly hitting their pen indoors?
- Will you serve alcohol under the table, or do it legally? (We all know what drinking habits are like at events)
- Getting the word out there
- Do you have any connections to notable players that can put the word out?
- Are you going to manage social media obligations by yourself on top of this?
- Are you going to run a chatroom (i.e., Discord) for your local?
Look at all of that. All of that before you even get to the “run a tournament” part, all of it with your reputation on the line. I see many comments and attitudes with the general theme of “just do it and deal with issues later 🙂” but that’s how you get incidents like the “spiking of water stations with vodka” incident at Frosty Faustings 2026.
If you’ve thought about most of these topics and how you would deal with them, congratulations: you are crazy enough to actually run a local. Most people are not thinking like this, and even among those who can think like this, they don’t want to do it because they realize it’s a big undertaking. That’s me. I’m that guy. I’m sooner buying myself a house versus starting a small business just to host some games.
Whenever you look at a big event like Combo Breaker, know that Rick has to deal with all of this. He has to employ people and request volunteers, see about sponsorships, delegate space at the event, use the pooled funds that come from attendance and registration fees as wisely as he can, have yearly negotiations with the Renaissance Scharumburg for hotel and venue usage: I can go on and on. Then realize he has to do this with every event he’s a part of. Same with Jebaily and CEO.
It’s no small feat to start a local. Next time someone says they don’t have a local that they can attend, keep it in mind that you do have to be crazy to go through with starting one, and sometimes online is all some people have.