From the floor
Running a gaming café, with the numbers shown
What cafés in India actually charge, what the floor actually earns, and what the rules actually ask of a bill. Written from the cafés running on Respawna · every piece here carries a figure you will not find on anybody else's website.
Floor playbook6 min
Who is allowed to start a session
Thirty stations on the platform belong to cafés that have priced nothing at all. A machine with no price cannot raise a bill, which is where free play starts.
Read itarrow_forwardFleet data8 min
What Indian gaming cafés actually charge an hour
Real hourly rates from 36 gaming cafés in India: a median of ₹120 for a PS5, ₹100 for a gaming PC, ₹200 for a racing rig, and the spread around each.
Read itarrow_forwardCompliance7 min
What the law wants on a gaming café bill
The fields CGST Rule 46 requires on a gaming café invoice, what happens to the number series when staff delete a bill, and what we found at four cafés.
Read itarrow_forward
Where these numbers come from
Every post here carries at least one figure read from the cafés running on Respawna, and no post ships without one. When the data contradicts the premise we drop the piece rather than write around it · two planned posts died that way, one claiming cafés leave sessions unbilled (not one ended session on the platform is uninvoiced) and one calling 11am to 4pm dead hours (that stretch carries 18.7% of all play).
The counts behind the current set, read in October 2026: 36 cafés, 27 of them with sessions on the floor, 4,263 sessions, 3,142 invoices and 518 stations, from February to October 2026. Cafés are never named and nothing here identifies a player. Where a figure is thin we say so in the post rather than round it up.
What we write about
- Fleet data · what cafés charge, when the floor is busy, who comes back. The same readings that drive the analytics a café sees.
- Compliance · what GST asks of a café bill, in plain words and never as legal advice. The software side is GST billing.
- Floor playbooks · the counter, the closing shift, who may start a session. What the staff actually do, on the live floor.
- Owner economics · what a floor costs to open and what it earns. If you are choosing software first, start with the buyer's guide.
New post every Tuesday, from the Respawna team.