A gaming cafe is the most extreme version of the shared-PC problem. Dozens of different people sit at the same machine every week — and a hardware ban does not know the difference.
Why cafes are a special case
A hardware ban attaches to a machine's identifiers, not to a person. In a home that affects a family; in a gaming cafe it can affect a stream of unrelated strangers. If one customer cheats and the PC earns a hardware ban, the next customer who logs their own account into that game on that machine can be caught by the banned fingerprint.
How cafes try to manage it
Many cafes run management software and restore-on-reboot setups that wipe the system drive back to a clean image between sessions. That resets software-level identifiers like the machine GUID — but it does not touch firmware identifiers such as the SMBIOS UUID, which stay with the motherboard regardless of how often the disk is restored.
Cafe programs
Some publishers recognise the problem and run dedicated cafe or internet-cafe programs. These give registered venues a supported way to operate, sometimes with their own licensing and handling, so that legitimate cafe play is not constantly mistaken for ban evasion.
What it means for customers
If you play at a cafe and find a fresh account flagged immediately, the machine may carry a previous customer's hardware ban. It is rarely something you caused, and an honest appeal explaining that you were on a public cafe PC is the right route.
The takeaway
Gaming cafes concentrate the shared-machine problem: many strangers, one hardware fingerprint. Restore-on-reboot resets the software layer but not the firmware, which is why publishers run cafe programs — and why a flagged account on a cafe PC is usually inherited, not earned.