Design Insights · 10/27/2026
About ten years ago, when I was mainly doing escape room construction, everyone usually quoted like this:
Full package: xxx; half package: xxx
If you asked what a half package was, it was basically today's theme license + mechanisms + on-site installation fee.
But the half package had one huge, easy-to-argue point: you had to define what "on-site installation" meant.
The contractor's expectation was: the client's carpenters had finished everything to the drawings, the electrical work was in place, and our people only needed to wire things up and debug.
The client's reality was: half the walls were partitioned, carpenters dared not start, and only lighting circuits had been run.
Back then, escape room construction money mainly came from the mechanisms.
Take a simple magnetic sensor that is common today. Contractors would never just sell the sensor to the client. They packaged it under a name clients could not understand—"teacup mechanism"—with a note that said: put the teacup on the table and the door opens automatically.
That kind of quoting could turn something worth 50 yuan into more than 3,000 yuan. For moving doors, moving walls, moving rooms, or "earthquake" effects that sounded high-end, the quoting got even more exaggerated.
Later came square-meter quoting. For a 300 sqm space at 2,000 yuan per square meter, the total would be 600,000 yuan.
I personally never really supported that method. It was too vague. What quality does 2,000 yuan per square meter actually mean? You cannot quantify it at all.
What happened next is known to everyone. More professional contractors and mechanism vendors entered the market and raised the industry to where it is today.
And I went from young Deng to old Deng.
Time flies. In the blink of an eye, ten years passed and I am already 25.