In case you missed it, David appeared on episode 11 of Riley Stock’s The Board Game Community Show to introduce escape rooms to a board gaming audience.
Riley is a natural interviewer who asked some really good questions and brought out the best in David. It was really to listen to them explore tabletop games, video games, and of course, escape rooms.
Give it a listen. It’s a great lead-up to the launch of REPOD Season 2 this week.
David Spira and Peih-Gee Law, the hosts of the Reality Escape Pod, will be livestreaming on Twitch this Wednesday as part of IndieCade’s weekly show Beyond Screens. Their guest is REA Hivemind Reviewer Brett Kuehner, aka “That Guy With The Puzzles,” a mechanical puzzle aficionado.
This week, David and Peih-Gee will be joined by Brett Kuehner, a mechanical puzzle aficionado. Brett will share his tips about how to approach mechanical puzzle box solving. Then he’ll let David and Peih-Gee take the reins while he plays the avatar in solving one of the puzzle boxes in his collection. Although mechanical puzzles of this sort, like trick locks, don’t belong in escape rooms, they are pretty fun to solve, and give us some of that same tangible satisfaction. Plus, these puzzles can be beautiful, intricate works of art. We invite the mechanical puzzle-curious (and those who are already fans) to join this Wednesday’s livestream with Brett.
IndieCade’s weekly show Beyond Screens has a rotating cast of hosts livestreaming on Twitch on Wednesdays at Noon Pacific / 3pm Eastern. David and Peih-Gee host about once a month, frequently playing games live with their guests. If there’s a creator you’d like to see join them for this segment, let us know!
Beyond Screens is IndieCade’s Twitch show exploring work that pushes the boundaries of, or comes entirely off of, the screen. Genres covered will include participatory theatre, alternate reality and live-action roleplaying; escape rooms; Big Games; and alternative controllers. Each hour-long episode will feature an in-depth conversation with creators of these genre-defining games.
Follow IndieCade on Twitch to stay up to date.
This report is the result of a survey circulated from February 26 – March 31, 2021. The survey aimed to understand the impact of the past year on escape rooms, primarily within the US, but also internationally. This report is based on the 677 survey responses.
Survey respondents included escape rooms owners and escape room players. The survey included a substantial section of questions that respondents only received if they identified as a business owner. The sections below that address industry are based on escape room owner responses.
64% of survey respondents identified as business owners. It is their answers that we are referring to when tabulating industry impact.
Of the business owner respondents, 76% operate only one facility. Thus the results in this section are primarily indicative of the impact of the pandemic on small businesses. Here’s where things stand for escape room businesses:
80% of respondents were open and operating in-person escape games as of March 2021, one year after the start of the pandemic.
14% of respondents were back to operating at full capacity. The rest were still operating at a reduced capacity.
Only 1.5% of respondents operated in-person escape games during all 12 months of 2020. The number of months a company was open during 2020 varied widely.
When asked about employees, the most popular answer (28%) was that the business had 6-10 employees at the start of the pandemic.
One year later, the number of respondents with 6-10 employees has decreased to 20%, and the number with 4-5 employees has increased to 22%.
The number of solo operators has increased. At the start of the pandemic 10% of respondents had no employees and that has increased to 16% of respondents one year later.
We see a similar trend on the high end, with 9% of respondents having more than 20 employees at the start of the pandemic, and one year later only 5% of respondents still employ more than 20 people.
Almost half of respondents (44%) did not create a new product during 2020, and they aren’t planning to create one in 2021. In the survey, a new product was defined as “not in-person escape games.”
For those who did create new products, a scheduled and hosted product (avatar-led or otherwise livestreamed game) was most popular (25%).
Some respondents (15%) created self-service, non-hosted digital products (i.e. puzzle hunt, print-and-play).
Some respondents (6%) created mailable products (i.e. tabletop escape game).
It’s interesting to note that as of March 2021, some respondents (17%) still planned to launch a new product although they had not yet.
For this question, the response “other” was popular with respondents (9%). Here’s a list of “other products” escape room owners created or invested in this year:
For those owners who created new products in 2020 (56% of all owner respondents), when asked about income from other product lines, most respondents noted that these products did not bring in the bulk of their income in 2020.
For 71% of respondents with new product lines, these products brought in less than 25% of their 2020 income.
In fact, for 20% of respondents with new product lines, these products brought in 0% of their 2020 income. However, the survey did not ask what they charged for these new products. Anecdotally, we know that many were offered for free, as marketing. Other factors that we cannot account for include the timing of these product launches and the marketing efforts behind them.
On the other extreme, 14% of respondents with new product lines noted that these products provided more than 75% of their 2020 income.
To reopen escape rooms, almost all respondents increased sanitization of the games (96%) and of the facility (94%).
Beyond sanitization, the majority of respondents had adjusted their schedules (71%), particularly to make sure different groups of customers would never cross paths (75%).
The majority of respondents (61%) kept pricing the same when they reopened.
When asked what changes they’d wished they’d made earlier (an open-ended question), by far the most popular response was around creating some form of online game. These responses included:
Here are the other popular responses:
Interestingly, there were both those respondents who wished they’d reopened sooner, and those who wished they’d closed sooner, in about equal numbers.
Escape room owners had to make a lot of challenging decisions over the past year, with little data to go on.
Pricing was especially challenging. While the majority of respondents didn’t change pricing, the shift to private bookings (across parts of the US that had previously operated with public bookings) meant smaller team sizes. The regrets around instituting player minimums and tiered pricing indicate the struggles business owners faced around pricing for smaller teams.
Creating a new product line is a huge undertaking and almost half of respondents didn’t do this. That said, it’s by the far the most common regret. Additionally, a year after online games emerged as a response to the pandemic, 17% of respondents still planned to start a new product line. The online games won’t necessarily disappear as escape room companies reopen for in-person games.
For this section on aid, we’re focusing on aid within the US, as the structured data was set up with the US government assistance programs in mind.
More than 50% of respondents applied to the following programs:
Here’s the percentage of respondents who had received aid from the following programs (as of March 2021):
Here’s the percentage of respondents who were expecting aid from the following programs (as of March 2021):
Of note, this data shows that most businesses that applied received the funds.
The majority of respondents received less than $30,000 in grants, with 24% receiving no grants. You can see the breakdown here:
Stated differently:
Almost half of respondents (43%) received $0 in loans. You can see the breakdown here:
Most respondents (68%) received less than $30,000 in loans.
On the high end, 10% of respondents received more than $150,000 in loans.
To learn more about the companies that received more than $150,000, please refer to our 6 Year US Escape Room Industry Report (August 2020).
In addition to these most popular programs, respondents applied to (and received funding from) many other relief programs. These primarily consisted of city, county, and state grants. Many of these grants were targeted for small businesses.
As of March 2021, overall, business outlook for 2021 was positive. 66% of owners rated their own outlook as “positive” or “very positive.”
Here are a few select quotes to capture this perspective:
Safe Small-Group Activity: “Small groups are looking for something safe and fun to do together. With live music and movies limited, escape rooms are a great alternative, for both the experienced and the uninitiated.”
Larger Market Opportunity: “We are doing the best we’ve ever done. By adding online, live avatar games, it has opened us up to an even larger market.”
International Business: “We only run online offerings and companies are clamoring for our games for team-building among employees in different countries. COVID or not, these employees will still be in different countries.”
New Product Line: “Business is decent in-store but online games have essentially doubled our revenue. If this keeps up, online games will be more profitable than brick and mortar.”
Growth: “We are so busy right now. People are happy to be out doing things again and we will be opening two new games.”
On the other hand, we must recognize the hardships others are facing after a challenging year:
Corporate Customers: “We have lost all of our corporate business. They simply don’t come any more.”
Rent Challenges: “It’s difficult to say if we can come to an agreement with landlord or government to get rent forgiveness so that we can continue. If not we will most likely declare bankruptcy.”
Disposable Income: “I am not confident that the next couple years will find people with spendable income.”
Game Capacity: “Private bookings reduced our ability to constantly max out room capacity. Rent is now hard to make up.”
Government Aid: “It’s really hard to say right now. A lot depends on which government assistance programs we are ultimately eligible for (and receive) — specifically thinking of SVOG here — and how quickly the market for escape rooms bounces back.”
Debt: “My outlook changes by the day. It’s worrisome that repayment of government loans will begin this year even when business is not strong.”
Forecast: “Honestly, I just have no idea what to expect at this point.”
When I read over the 252 open-ended responses to this question, the most frequent theme is optimism that there is pent-up demand for safe entertainment, and escape rooms deliver that safe, small-group entertainment the world seeks. In March of 2021, many owners were already seeing this demand; bookings were picking up. While for some businesses the revenue loss of prolonged closures in 2020 will be insurmountable, others will be able to recover.
Most of the survey respondents identified as players. While 36% of respondents identified primarily as players, most of those who identified primarily as owners also identified as players. Anyone who identified as a player (whether or not they identified as an owner) received a set of questions that is the basis for the results in this section.
Not surprisingly, the respondents were almost universally (96%) excited by real-life (in-person) escape rooms.
The survey asked these escape room players their perspectives on the other types of games that have emerged over the last year. Not all adjacent product lines appeal to everyone equally:
Neutral (neither agree nor disagree) was also a popular reaction to these types of escape room adjacent products. Consistently, for every product listed above, 26%-31% of respondents were neutral towards it.
While the majority of respondents (60%) played fewer escape games in 2020 than 2019 (counting in-person, digital, and tabletop escape games), almost a quarter of respondents (22%) actually played more.
These escape room-adjacent product lines are not an exact match to real-life escape rooms, in terms of product-market fit.
A significant number of escape room players are excited about them (especially about puzzle hunts and tabletop escape games). For some players, the growth of these other styles of escape room play has afforded them more opportunity to play and support this industry.
While there is certainly an eager market for these product lines among escape room players, we would not recommend that escape room owners read the data above as a recommendation to start creating puzzle hunts. If you’re looking to diversify your product lines, choose the type of product that best fits your business and abilities as a game designer. Make a product you can make well.
These are different products for similar, but not identical markets. Point-and-click escape rooms, tabletop escape rooms, and puzzle hunts were all already thriving before 2020. There’s room for more of these products in a post-pandemic world; with their adjacent audiences, they can help reach more potential escape rooms players, and bring new opportunities to escape room businesses. That said, because of the overlapping (but not identical) audience, over the long term it may be difficult to compete within these existing markets. (There is a vibrant puzzle hunt community, for example, that has been creating a ton of their own content for many years.)
For avatar-led livestreamed games, which largely didn’t exist prior to 2020, our expectation is that only a few will thrive in a post-quarantine world. These take continual effort and space to produce, and all compete against each other globally for market share. Plus, when customers return to in-person entertainment, we expect the market for them to shrink. It’s likely that only the incredibly well-executed games, and the games whose marketing machines have captured the majority of the audience, will continue to flourish.
The distribution of responses to these product lines, including the substantial neutral response, shows that while these products are similar to escape rooms, not all escape room players are excited about them (any or all of them). They do not fully replace real-life escape rooms for many people. I have to imagine that a neutral response (indifference) is likely a negative response in this circumstance, as it doesn’t signal a motivation to spend money on that type of experience.
We can also add, anecdotally, that among the 2 dozen writers here at Room Escape Artist, interest in these different product lines has ebbed and flowed over the course of the year. At times certain writers tired of different escape room-adjacent product types.
Meanwhile, the survey results conclusively show that there is little risk of escape room players not returning to the real-life games that they love. They will return.
As analysts we see a strong future for escape rooms in a post-quarantine world. With a growing demand for in-person entertainment, escape rooms present an intimate option that can be enjoyed with small groups of friends and family. This style of play will appeal to both cautious and cavalier customers alike.
While the player audience has enjoyed the various online and play-at-home options that have emerged from the pandemic, there is no universal agreement on which forms they preferred as a community. There is near unanimous agreement that this community is excited to return to real-life escape games.
At this point, more escape room businesses have remained in operation than we were expecting at the beginning of the pandemic. It’s difficult to assess whether that should be attributed to government intervention, business decisions, or the generally smaller size and lower operating expenses of escape room businesses relative to most in-person entertainment.
Additionally, it is impossible to predict whether the survival is short-term as the businesses will have to operate with debt that was accrued to survive rather than grow.
For our part, we will continue to do our best to grow the escape room and immersive gaming community and monitor the situation in future studies and reports. We are cautiously optimistic about the near future of the escape room world.
This survey was entirely anonymous. We cannot track responses back to individuals.
The majority of respondents (84%) were from the United States.
However, the survey had representation from 28 countries including Canada (4%), United Kingdom (3%), and Germany (1.5%).
Survey representation by US state biased towards the most populous states: California (16%), Florida (8%), and Texas (7%).
Room Escape Artist has been reporting on the growth and health of the escape room industry since 2016. You can find our other 2020 reports here:
Previous studies will remain available:
If you’re interested in participating in future surveys to help contribute to aggregate industry data, please click the link below.
If you’re interested in learning more about escape rooms, please join us at RECON, our online escape room convention for industry professionals and players that is happening August 22-23.
We have outstanding speakers, a digital exhibit hall showcasing incredible vendors, and a platform that will enable conversation and community.
This event is for business owners, game designers, players, journalists, and anyone with a professional or recreational interest in escape rooms and immersive games.
Thank you to everyone who helped us write, test, and distribute this survey. We especially want to thank the escape room owners we consulted with on how to write some of these questions: Andrew Preble (Escape My Room), Ethan Rodriguez-Torrent (Escape New Haven), and Anne Lukeman (CU Adventures in Time and Space). We are also extremely thankful for the perspectives and keen eyes of the REA Team, including our directory manager Melissa, and many of the REA Hivemind Writers, especially Brett Kuehner and Matthew Stein for their careful editing.
There are lots of ways to support Room Escape Artist, like buying from Amazon or Etsy after clicking into the links included in this post or backing us on Patreon.
The money that we make from these helps us to grow the site and continue to add more value to the community that we love so much.
If you found this survey valuable, we’d really appreciate your support. It will help us provide more industry research and reporting in the future.
We are so excited to bring you RECON ’21 this August! Here are the top 5 things you need to know right now.
The Basic Ticket is pay-what-you want and it gets you access to every featured talk.
We have a number of speakers announced already, with the rest of the lineup coming soon to the RECON website. If you’ve been wowed by Locurio, Post Curious, or Project Avatar, you won’t want to miss these speakers, and so many more.
There are only a handful left.
If you’re interested in a curated RECON experience, we highly recommend you purchase a VIP ticket today.
More than half the tickets are already claimed. The Virtual Escape Jam sold out last year, and the waitlist just kept growing.
If you want to design a game, this is a great way to get started, or brush up on your skills – all experience levels welcome!
The RECON Pro ticket includes a workshop, an active learning small-group session where you take part in the creative process. You can choose between Game Design, Storytelling, Creative Puzzles, and Hospitality.
These are a new feature at RECON that we’re super excited about!
The RECON Play Pass is currently only $50. It includes access to at least 2 limited-run games, unique player meetup opportunities, and much more.
We’ll be announcing more details soon, and as soon as we do, the price will go up. If you love playing games and want games to be a part of your RECON experience, we encourage you to grab your Play Pass at the early bird rate. You can add it to any RECON ticket!
He started with The Safe from The Room, the iconic video game series. Now, he’s back with another LEGO IDEAS project.
This time, Roger Schembri is bringing to life the Dollhouse from Old Sins, the fourth installment from The Room.
With enough support, it can become an actual, tangible reality, outside of the videogame. And it’s free to support!
We spoke with Roger about his first LEGO IDEAS project in October. That project now has more than 2,800 supporters. If a project reaches 10,000 supporters then the LEGO group will consider it to be made into an official LEGO set.
In that interview, Roger tells us all about his relationship with The Room (he’s one of the original game developers) and LEGO IDEAS. You’ll be able to feel his passion for these projects.
As fans of the The Room and of Legos, we’re pretty excited about both these projects. We’d love to create the enchanted dollhouse within which Old Sins takes place.
It’s easy. Just click the button above to go to the LEGO IDEAS project page, and support the project. It’s free to support. And if you know other people who’d like to build this video game dollhouse, please give this one a social media boost as well.
If you enjoy The Room, we hope you’ll check out our interview with co-creator Barry Meade of Fireproof Studios on The Reality Escape Pod.
