Here’s a fascinating thing: a hotel with an “esports room“. Hatten Hotel, the 5-star hotel situated in the heart of the historic city of Melaka, Malaysia, is offering an experience that caters to a really specific demographic: us gamers.
Hotels are mostly catered to business folks and family vacations, so to see them setting up rooms specifically so you can play games all night long is quite the novel idea.
Gamer Matters had the opportunity to take a 2 days, 1 night trip to stay in Hatten Hotel’s esports room, and here’s what we found out.
A Proper Gamer Cave
The esports room is technically two rooms with adjoining doors: a connecting room. One room has 5 single beds, two of which are bunk beds. The other uses the large space where beds would go to have 5 fully-decked-out gaming PCs.
Each room has the same amenities at the front end, a lounge with a TV, closet, minibar and small countertops plus two bathrooms.
One side of the lounge has Todak-branded bean chairs, the other has a dining table and chairs overlooking the two TVs. Only one side of the minibar is stocked with complementary foods and drinks.
The give identical gaming PC setup, built by Dreamcore, is fairly competent specs-wise. Not necessarily top-of-the-line, but for esports games the specs are more than enough.
Hatten Hotel Esports Room PC Specs
Here are the specs, and included peripherals, for the PC setups at the Hatten Hotel Esports Room (accurate as of December 2024):
- CPU: Intel Core i5-12400F
- GPU: Nvidia RTX 3060
- RAM: 16GB RAM 12GB VRAM
- Storage: 2TB
- Display: Samsung Odyssey OLED G6 360Hz
- Peripherals:
- Techware Spectre Pro RGB Gaming Keyboard
- Fantech Katana VX9S Gaming Mouse
- Creative Zen Hybrid Pro headset
- Creative Pebble X Gaming Speakers
- Chair: Todak Throne Gaming Chair
The price of the PC alone is quoted to be worth RM12,000. And there’s five of them.
Gaming Stations
The PCs in the esports room is advertised to have been pre-installed with “ten of the latest esports games”, though the list of installed games are inconsistent between each PC.
But it’s fine, you can login to Steam or Epic Games Store with your own account and install the games you own if it isn’t on there. You can also install games from the Microsoft Store if you have PC Game Pass or legit have bought games there, but just know that logging out and dissociating the PC with your account and converting it back to a local account is a cumbersome process. Stick with Steam, Epic and other game-specific launchers. Those are easy to log out and not leave a trace, something you need to do upon check out.
The PC has about 2TB of storage size, and with internet speeds at 1GBps. Bejeweled 3, an old (but good) puzzle game about 93MB in size, is installed as soon as you hit the download button. Larger games like Forza Horizon 5 (it’s more than 100GB these days, with all the DLCs) will take some time to download of course, but nothing’s stopping you from downloading and installing the games you have access to.
The monitors, the Samsung Odyssey G6, looks really unassuming (you can barely see the Samsung logo on the little chin at the front) but it is what makes this setup esports-ready. The monitor can go up to 360Hz, a ridiculously high refresh rate which can show tiny details in those extra frames being rendered per second, which are crucial for top players to make clutch plays and perform at their best.
But for us regular gamers, the monitor’s OLED screen is bright and sharp which makes the games we are intimately familiar with still blow us away in their graphical beauty.
The setups have audio peripherals from Creative, including headsets and the Pebble Pro speakers.
While the room is advertised as “esports”, it’s just as a good for variety gaming. Most games can run decently well on an RTX 3060.
Forza Horizon 5 averages at 78 FPS at 1440p on Ultra, whereas Cyberpunk 2077 can maintain at 60 FPS at 1440p High/Ray Tracing Low settings. That’s decent, more than decent. And it’s definitely top-tier for esports games which are less demanding performance-wise. CS2 runs like a breeze.
And if you’re more of a console gamer, it’s possible to plug in a PS5, Xbox or a Switch and hook them to the PC monitors. There are plug sockets at desk height to connect a console to on at least one of the PC setups on the side, and the large desks have enough room to place a console on. You can bring a console to the esports room just to play EA FC. Not that you should, but you definitely could.
A Gamer’s Retreat
It’s not a proper gamer cave without the one thing that unites the gamer aesthetic: RGB lighting. I am both in awe and bewildered that the two rooms have LED strips all over them for that proper gaming ambiance. The gamer glow is not just in the gaming room, it’s also in the bedroom and above the minibars and counters at the front of the room.
Heck, there’s RGB lighting in the showers! The showers!
The lighting is thankfully a relaxing fade between purple and blue hues, no garish red or green. And if you wish to only use the default orange-hue lights hotel rooms usually has, there is a switch turn all the tomyam restaurant lighting off, thankfully.
The esports room doesn’t have a view—it’s a covered wall in the gaming room, while the bedroom has windows facing inward within the hotel rather than toward the city skylines. But let’s be real, this is actually a plus for the target demographic. It really feels like a gamer cave, secluded from the hustle and bustle of the outside world.
It’s cool to see Hatten Hotel figured out a way to make what would be an otherwise less desirable room to be more desirable for a specific demographic. This is a proper gamer cave.
Though I dread to think about what other guests might think of the sounds coming from this room, especially when there’s five gamers fully tilted at the towers. There’s no sound deadening whatsoever. But at least the rooms are situated on the 12th floor among the premium suites. And Hatten Hotel does enforce house rules by reminding you guests to turn down the noise a bit after 10 PM.
The gamer/esports theme continues to room service. The menu on offer are all finger food, from fries to gyoza dumplings. It’s priced as expected from a 5-star hotel room service menu, of course, which will shock anyone who regular prepares frozen food in their own kitchen.
But it’s better this than the alternative, taking a 3-course dinner up at the hotel lounge. That’s 2-3 hours of not being in that gaming room gaming.
There’s not much to complaint regarding the regular hotel amenities. Plug sockets are in abundance and within reach of all five beds, even the top bunk beds have access to a nearby socket to charge your phone or device as you doze off into the night.
And you’ll definitely doze off sweet and sound. The pillows are properly fluffy, the bed is comfy and the blankets will keep you from freezing under the 20 degrees Celsius cold of the room’s air conditioning.
The showers aren’t in the best condition, the door doesn’t fit snuggly and the hot water is on the tepid warm scale rather than refreshingly hot.
But the rest of the amenities are tip-top.
Plus, a 2D1N stay like what we have entitled guests for the morning’s breakfast buffet, which is nice.
And for those travelling separately, multiple cars can park in the hotel’s carpark and be charged a flat fee of RM5 per day instead of the per-hour parking rate for non-guests.
The Price
Now here’s something that needs to be seen to believe. The base price of Hatten Hotel’s Esports room, the “E-Sports Escape” package (without breakfast) starts at RM999 per night. That’s more expensive than the Hatten Premier Suite which can cost RM973 per night, and that’s with breakfast buffet included!
The package we’re staying with does include breakfast, which would have cost us RM1,288 per night.
So you better turn up with a full party of five to really get the most out of the room, and split the cost. Roughly RM200-RM260 per pax is a good deal, as long as four of them are fine with sleeping in a bunk bed.
Who Is The Esports Room Is For?
Hatten Hotel has clearly been designed to cater to what actual gamers care for. A full suite of gaming PC with good peripherals. Complimentary minibar snacks that appeals to folks who want quick bursts of energy and easy-to-prepare food (Red Bulls, canned coffee, assorted selection of instant ramen and granola bars). The RGB lighting that’s not overly garish. Abundance of plugs to charge any device.
The hotel attendees were clearly not too familiar with gaming, but it’s also clear that they know well enough to accomodate guests. They told us some specific details on how to get the headsets working, for example.
Who would benefit from these esports room the most? The most ideal case is proper esports teams. An esports org with the cash to spare can send their team of usually five players for a staycation while still able to conduct some scrims and have players feel like home with good PC setups.
In fact, they should cater this room to actual esports teams looking to do bootcamps and prep for upcoming tournaments.
It can also be perfect for a group of young adult friends who games a lot but want to spend time in real room for once instead of a virtual one like on Discord. Take a walk around Dataran Pahlawan shopping center, visit the historic sites like the Stadhuys Building and A Famosa, and unwind from doing some touristy things by playing some games all night. A gamer’s retreat, if you will.
Hatten Hotel also offers access to the esports room PC on a per-hour basis, if you happen to be staying here in another room but want to play games with at least one other person to kill some time. Yes, it can also be a very expensive cyber cafe.
If you find the idea of being able to stay at a prestigious hotel just so you can play Overwatch 2 on proper gaming PC setups and get tilted alongside friends IRL fairly amusing, and can afford it, Hatten Hotel’s Esports room offers precisely that experience. And it’s quite the experience.
Accommodation provided by Samsung Malaysia