It’s official. According to an announcement on the Redbox website, starting June 17, 2011 Redbox kiosks across the country will commence renting video games for the Playstation 3, Xbox 360 and Wii. With roughly 20-30 games including Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood, Black Ops, Brink and L.A. Noire, there’s sure to be something available that will make the whole family happy. The price is a bit more than what it cost to rent a movie. For $2.00 + tax, you can rent a video game for the day.
Let’s think about this – you pick up a game on Friday after work; keep it for the weekend; take it back on Sunday evening and you’re looking at maybe $8 bucks. With enough time and effort, you can finish a game in that amount of time and have only paid a quarter of what it would’ve cost you to purchase it outright. You can’t beat that deal.
If you’ve never used Redbox, you’re missing out. It truly is one of the greatest inventions of technology in the modern day (of course I’m joking with that claim, but it is a pretty cool system), which in my opinion, contributed to Blockbuster’s financial woes. Redbox is quick, easy, convenient and efficient. You can create an account at their website and reserve your movies (and now games). Then you can just stop by the Redbox location where you made the reservation and pick up your goods. Redbox kiosks are sprouting up everywhere and becoming more common than Starbucks. For example, our local Wal-Mart has a Redbox at each entrance/exit. Not one but TWO Redbox machines. The grocery store a mile down the road has two Redbox machines that sit side by side, an A and B. I’m not even kidding.
The Redbox website is pretty slick. For example, with the games, you can click on the game, watch a trailer, read a description and read or write a review. You can sort by the platform of your choice (or by rating, genre, etc.) and see what is available in your area. Yes, you can enter your zipcode and it will tell you all the kiosks near your location and what games and movies it has loaded up in it. That is pretty nifty if you ask me.
The Redbox machines are extremely easy to use and intuitive. I think the Start screen has three buttons – Rent a DVD, Return a DVD or Online Rental Pick Up. (There are a couple others, but you seldom ever need to use them). It’s so easy to use, you can pull up the curb and pick up or drop off your discs in roughly the minute it takes to push the buttons and have the mechanics of the machine eject or receive the disc (obviously longer if you need to browse before you rent). You do have to have a credit card which might be a detractor for some. If you think about it though, the company has to have a way to recoup the cost of the item to prevent people from never returning it. If that were to happen, Redbox charges you the value of the item.
I’m excited with Redbox’s announcement. With the economy such that it is, people don’t have the money to spend on extra items like video games, especially with their ever rising costs and relatively low trade in value. This will give gamers an opportunity to play a diverse collection of games for cheap, myself included.
Redbox’s movie business model really caused its competitors to play catch up and actually some never really recovered from the new competition. I think it will be interesting to see how video game stores respond to this new competition and if it will have the same impact on them that it did the movie stores.
