Dallas DFW Airport Supplies Overwatch & Other Games For Delyaed Travelers
By TJ Denzer ·
Passengers with a love of video games won't be lacking for something to do if their travel plans are delayed at the Dallas Fort Worth International Airport. Gameway has added gaming lounges for visitors to enjoy while they wait for their flight.
Getting stuck while traveling can be extremely frustrating. You can either partake in spotty wi-fi to try access the internet, engage in a number of generally overpriced cafes and shops, or sitting on your hands waiting for your time to come. The Dallas Fort Worth International Airport is working to alleviate the situation by supplying delayed passengers with gaming opportunities to pass their time until their flight.
As reported by Dallas Business Journal, the Dallas DFW has recently installed two gaming lounges for visitors to partake in during their time at the airport. These installations opened on June 30, 2018. Based on a model of gaming and PC rooms in Korea, the company Gameway has established their own version of these rooms with rows of flatscreen TVs and Xbox Ones for users to partake in. Each Xbox is pre-loaded with almost 20 games including Fortnite, Rocket League, and Overwatch.
As most things in an airport terminal are, the Gameway lounges at the DFW aren't exactly cost friendly. Customers pay 42 cents per minutes or $20 for an unlimited amount of time during their stay. At one hour you're already talking about spending about $25 plus tax.
Even so, Gameway President Jordan Walbridge is optimistic in expanding these lounges throughout American airports.
“Gameway’s purpose is to make airports entertaining,” Walbridge said. “With 50 percent of Americans playing video games at least three hours per week or more, and the average gamer being a male who’s 35 and a female in their mid 40s, this demographic perfectly aligns with who is traveling at the airport.”
The Gameway lounges, despite their cost, still offer an opportunity that wasn't there before and players that have an Xbox Live account can access their accounts to enjoy all of their milestones and achievements in games like Overwatch, but they can also use default Gameway accounts to play online. If the Gameway model does well at Dallas Fort Worth International, hopefully it could expand to other airports as well, offering a unique outlet for players to engage with while they wait. It will be interesting to see how these lounges do as time passes.
Perhaps we'll be playing Call of Duty in airports in 2019? If so, we may be able to enjoy some of the single player campaign as we wait to board our flights, as Infinity Ward has posted job openings that point to single player campaign development.
[Featured by Dallas Business Insider]