By Tom S. Noda
Computerworld Philippines
November 13, 2009

“More profitable” and “beneficial to a nation” are the words that were used to describe the effects of shifting a gaming net café into a non-gaming one. And such call is now being pushed by I-Café Pilipinas, a newly formed advocacy group in the Philippines.

According to Edgardo Zafra, chairman of I-Café, a non-gaming net café is more profitable than a gaming one and his group now aims to shift café owners’ focus to non-gaming services, which he claimed, is “more helpful and healthy for the customers and the nation as a whole.”

Zafra explained a “pure” gaming cafe (no other services but LAN and online games) will have its revenue from computer rent only, which nowadays can be as low as PhP5.00 per hour, depending on the competition in their areas.

However, a “non-gaming” café  (no LAN games and online games are of FarmVille kind only), he said, has customers doing online research for their work and studies, job searches, people communicating by chatting or VoIP (Skype and YM), and other activities except games. “These kind of customers avail of other café services like scanning, typing and printing, which add significantly to the computer rent income of the business,” Zafra stressed.

Yet Zafra added profit margins on other café services he mentioned are much better than computer rental, which normally breaks-even when a workstation earns Php100 per day of pure rental.

“There are Internet cafes that offer both gaming and non-gaming services but experience show that you cannot offer both in the same space,” Zafra said. “Non gaming customers do not like to be mixed with gaming customers. This is the reason why you see separate gaming and non-gaming sections on cafes in the malls.”

Zafra recently told Computerworld Philippines that 80% of cafe revenues are from gaming services but clarified that it does not necessarily mean that those engaged in gaming services are making money.

“The attrition rate in the industry is very high because most café owners are focused on gaming services,” he said.

According to Zafra, there are around 30,000 to 40,000 Net cafes in the Philippines today, both legal and illegal, with average PC units of 10 to 400 units.

I-Café, which did its formal launch recently with the help of the Commission on ICT (CICT), announced its proposal for the creation of a national law that will increase the entry barrier among Net café businesses in the Philippines. 

Zafra said by increasing the entry barrier of Net cafes, it will solve the industry problems relating to quality of establishments, software piracy, IT security, user education, including the practice of right norms or etiquettes of users while inside a public net café. 

A group of partners and affiliates with no individual memberships, I-Café’s main goal is to serve as the guiding body for the creation of local government laws related to the Net café industry.

CICT recently expressed its support to I-Café as both aim to turn Net cafés in the Philippines into community “e-centers” – a government project that is focused on educating the public about the benefits of ICT.

Ray Anthony-Roxas Chua III, chairman of CICT, said earlier on that by turning Net cafes into community e-centers, there is a lesser need to build new establishments since the infrastructure exists already and what is needed is for it to function as a public ICT learning center.

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