I ran an original 2017 HTC Vive at my arcade until 2021, which is a very long time in virtual reality.
My competitors replaced their headsets constantly. Vive Pro, Index, Quest 2, Focus 3, tens of thousands of dollars a year, and every launch came with marketing about how their hardware beat mine. They are closed and I was not.
I am not claiming the hardware did not matter. I am claiming that what kept the doors open was that I marketed the afternoon people were going to have, and they marketed the equipment it would happen on.
Nobody outside the hobby knows what those specs mean
The most common version of this mistake is a post that reads "come try our virtual reality on our fully wireless headsets, 4K per eye" and then a spec sheet.
Are you Best Buy? Are you selling the customer that headset to take home? Then the specification is not information, it is noise. The only thing the customer needs to know about your hardware is that it works.
The person booking is usually a parent organizing a tenth birthday, or a best man organizing a stag. Neither of them knows what pixels per eye means, neither of them wants to learn, and telling them anyway costs you their attention.
The entertainment giants never do this and it is not an accident
Dave & Buster's does not post the specifications of the televisions you will watch the game on. TopGolf does not advertise its ball-tracking sensors. Chuck E. Cheese does not talk about anything technical at all.
Go and scroll any of them. It is people having a good time, over and over, for years. These are companies with marketing budgets larger than your annual revenue and they arrived at this by testing.
If the biggest operators in the industry all sell the experience, the burden of proof is on the venue that wants to sell the hardware.
Show your demographic having the day you want them to buy
The job in location-based entertainment is to persuade people to spend limited free time and limited disposable income at your building instead of somewhere else. Nobody wants to waste a Friday on a place that turns out to be flat.
So the marketing has to let them picture it. That means photographs and video of people who look like your customers, in your building, visibly enjoying themselves. A parent needs to see kids like hers. A group of adults needs to see a group of adults.
That is most of what content work is for a venue: getting enough real footage of your own place that you never have to fall back on a spec sheet or a stock photo.
Try it for a month. If it does nothing you can go back, but I have never seen it do nothing.
The one time hardware is worth mentioning
Upgrades.
When you buy new equipment, say so, because it is genuine news and it tells regulars something has changed. Just say it as an experience: the games look better now, there are no cables to trip on, the wait is shorter. Not the model number.
Why my competitors lost the argument they were winning
They were right on the merits. Their headsets were better than mine, and they said so constantly.
The trouble is that they were arguing with me, in public, about a question no customer had asked. Meanwhile most of my bookings came from parents organizing parties who could not tell a 2017 headset from a 2021 one and had no reason to care. They wanted to know their kid would have a great birthday.
There is also a financial version of the same point. The technology moves faster than any small venue can fund. Trying to always own the newest hardware is not a strategy, it is a subscription you cannot cancel, and it was the largest line item my competitors had.