I always like to summarize my business years with one word and the State of Prodigy for 2024 in one word is ‘Primed.’ In the almost 7 years that Prodigy has been providing a massive, dedicated space for gamers, the course and overall atmosphere hasn’t ever been this finely tuned. January brought the first minigolf tournament I’ve ever hosted on a new course that was only a year old at the time. Since then, I have made some slight changes as well as some massive improvements to perfect some more of those juicy hole-in-one trajectories. I will be releasing new strategy videos for these updates soon. The pool table got refelted and plays better than ever. The Vertical Labyrinth got moved to the front of the room and got a timer added with a log book for people’s speedrun documentation. The hooks for the Ring N Hooks got replaced with their original hooks from Prodigy’s opening that I feel always had the best ring-stick. The room added 3 new video gaming stations (making 18 in total) for maximum choice and optimal comfort. I changed out all my LED blacklights once again, but with better models for a better hue and striking presence on some of the holes. And finally, Prodigy Event Center opened and was able to give our fighting game tournaments a better home in which to compete. This also freed up a lot of space in Prodigy with moving all the live streaming desks and equipment out. Overall, the room plays strong and the vibe is mossy. Now… let’s look at the numbers.
Look at this graaaaph and you’ll snatch up two big takeaways; overall attendance was lower than the last few years and rent ironically loves to take up a lot of real estate on these graphs.
Takeaway 1: The bar graph shows relative attendance year to year. Having a 2024 dip like this could potentially scare a small business owner, but I happen to know a couple reasons for this statistical decline and fear, I do not. These graphs do not include the Event Center, where all my weekly tournament goers now attend instead of Prodigy and that total number alone would push the attendance to almost a dead heat with last year, so that’s one reason. The other reason is a little more complicated. You see… I share a back parking area with all of the other wonderful Easthampton mills and for most Fridays for half the year, there happened to be an outdoor event using another mill’s parking lot, thus filling up all of my parking on Fridays with their patrons’ vehicles. In fact on average, we saw a 50-75% loss in attendance on these sluggish nights, but alas, I am working with the city for a solution. Keep in mind, we have parking in front of our mill as well that usually has spots open.
Takeaway 2: What you see on the pie graph is percent of every dollar you spend at Prodigy and where all of it goes. Rent has been increasing and biting a massive chunk from the percentages and hasn’t been in the 30’s percentages since 2020. We’ll go more in depth with this tomorrow in the ‘Future Report.’ A/V equipment included the new blacklights and new gaming stations so that was very typical spending while building supplies weren’t as needed this year with so much being built last year. All in all, very understandable percentages for everything including my own pay which saw a massive drop, but only motivates me to work even harder to get my attendance back up. Hey, lower pay means less taxes. Win… win? 🙂
For tomorrow, I’ll have a couple more graphs for you outlining the future. Thank you as always for stopping down and supporting my gameroom. I believe this type of transparency allows my customers to be more confident with spending their hard-earned money when attending Prodigy. I try my hardest to keep things fair and I hope that’s something you notice.
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