While Reinaldo Soares, 64, was talking to an article from Agência Mural, a customer was standing up to be served, with his cell phone in hand. The resident went to RPJ Tecnologia Lan House, located in the Nova Poá neighborhood, in Poá, in Greater São Paulo, because he had doubts about using the device.
This type of service is now routine at the lan house – a space that used to be used to access computers with internet. Roxo, as Reinaldo is called in the neighborhood, charges a symbolic value of R$2 to R$3 to pass on his knowledge on how to use cell phone functions.
The change in the Brazilian connectivity mode has boosted new services in these environments. In order to survive, especially on the outskirts, lan houses were also transformed into stationery stores, increased sales of electronic products and even became a kind of local post office, receiving deliveries from the neighborhood.
“These are services for us to be adding, right? Because today’s lan house does not have a profitable feedback, despite the children needing to do schoolwork”, highlights Roxo, who has a bachelor’s degree in administration, with a postgraduate degree in economic engineering.
This aggregate serves to dribble changes in user behavior.
In 2008, the Internet Steering Committee placed more than half of Brazilians (52%) as frequent users of lan houses. In 2014 it pointed to only 22%.
Since then, access via cell phone has been erasing the lans from surveys. Home, work or mobile phones are now the main access points, according to Tic Domicílios (Research on the Use of Information and Communication Technologies in Brazilian Households).
Due to the lack of movement in Itaquera, Roxo moved and opened a new space in Nova Poá, where he has a family. Among his goals was to insert his children, Jaiane, 35, Mayko, 46, and Reinaldo Júnior, 40, into the job market.
But it was not possible to keep them all. “Revenue is very low, it is not possible to generate sustainability for everyone”.
Today the children work with administration and marketing. Only Roxo and his wife, Regina de Jesus Dutra, 59, continued in the business. She makes handicrafts for sale at the store.
Pandemic has increased demand for digital help and remote work
The lan house remained open for another ten years until the covid pandemic, but the company maintained the service of other digital services. It even helped residents to request and receive emergency aid.
The reopening was in February 2022, with online services created and expanded, focusing on printing, product sales and electronics maintenance. There is still the computer area, but in a separate location.
Thinking about these cases, the couple seeks to expand trade by placing small work offices, in view of the growing demand for remote work after the social isolation caused by the pandemic.
Alongside the new services, virtual games are resisting. Classics like GTA and Counter Strike remain on the machines, but the 12-year-old kids, who are frequent customers, are already starting to get interested in new games, including Minecraft and Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga.
“And it’s nice to see them interacting. Then one plays a game here, another there, they end up having a challenge between them, in these games. This continues to exist in the lan house, which ‘can’t be done’ via cell phone”, comments Purple.
Four kilometers away, in downtown Suzano, between lottery, cafeterias and markets, a row of young boys settles in front of computers in a garage at Eletro House.
There, they talk, shout, interact with each other or with someone on the other side of the screen. But the gaming scene is different.
“Today people like open-world games, there’s CS, there’s the mobile one, Free Fire, there’s Fortnite, that Valorant game came out too”, says Cláudio Ferrari, 38, owner of the lan house that has been in business for a long time. 13 years old at the same address.
Open world games are those in which the user is free to explore and carry out activities in the scenario developed by the game.
Graduated in information technology, Ferrari created the lan house in order to continue a family tradition focused on commerce and unite with a passion: games.
If the boys are still playing, the interactivity has changed. “I hear their conversations: ‘Oh, I’m playing with someone from Minas Gerais, one from the United States’.” A connectivity impossible to imagine in the lan houses boom in the first half of the 2000s.
Another nostalgic factor of the heyday of lan houses were the famous “corujões”. An activity in which the public spent the night playing inside the place.
“It’s not even possible to count how many owls we made, the people who would play and spend hours and hours playing”, recalls Ferrari.
Even with the young audience, from 15 to 32 years old, attending the place, operating restrictions put an end to the owls.
Today, while young people remain in the games, a good part of the public comes for prints and copies related to documents and making résumés. “I’ve been coming here lately to make prints. I don’t have a printer at home, it’s always been useful to me”, says customer Almério de Cássio Rodrigues, a geography teacher in the municipality, while waiting for a printed document to be delivered from Ferrari’s hands.
Ferrari says it is frequently changing, testing out new options, from sweets to a fridge with soda, an idea that had to be scrapped because of the high energy consumption. An arcade still stands at the entrance to the lan house. In the beginning there were up to three machines installed.
Seniors look for the device and get together after work to play games and miss the old days, as well as young people who discover a new activity they didn’t know about.
“Many people cannot have a computer at home, especially a gaming computer that is still very expensive today”, says Ferrari.
Doing a search on the Therabyte website, which specializes in selling PC Gamers, a machine of this type, designed to withstand gaming graphics and videos without crashing and with good performance, ranges from R$3,500 to R$15,691.
At the lan house in Suzano, the hour to play games costs R$ 3, in computers with high capacity for virtual games. But Ferrari points out: “It’s not even close to what it was in 2009, because it wasn’t just gaming. People were looking for a lot to use social networks.”
Pandemic made lan houses a point of reference for deliveries
Another market that also became the focus of these businesses was deliveries. During the pandemic, Roxo was contacted by Mercado Livre and Shopee to offer a partnership to deliver and receive merchandise across the neighborhood.
In Mogi das Cruzes, the sidewalk of the X Lan House and Papelaria Area experienced something similar. On the front, a banner with various symbols of delivery services such as Mercado Livre, Shopee, Magalu, Amazon appears on a yellow background.
For Tomás Machado dos Santos, 36, owner of the establishment, the partnership was a salvation, along with the expansion of the stationery trade, in July 2021.
“At first I thought it wouldn’t work out very well, because it was very little, few boxes [de mercadorias]. Today is going really well. There are, on average, 300 boxes, every day.”
In addition to the issue of the pandemic, Tom, as he prefers to be called, comments that the installation of residential buildings in the neighborhood has reduced the use of computers. Before the pandemic, there were 15 machines, today there are only 6.
The place also makes room for backpacks and toys, which share space with gift packaging, school items, headphones, flash drive, keyboard, mouse and some snacks and sweets — the first items to appear in the catalog besides the machines.
When Tom started, in 2006, “there was an audience that lined up”; the drop in movement began to be felt more in 2018.
“Today, people are already looking for a lot to do documentation, a second way of billing, something from the INSS. With the pandemic, there was a lot that had to be done by digital, there are people who come here looking for that. from a location near the neighborhood to print a document.”
Among other quick services performed by Tom, he mentions downloading music to CD and transferring data to flash drive or cell phone.
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