Best Buy Testing Used Game Trade-In Waters
Back in May, the delightful Pixel Poet wrote about how Wal-Mart was installing vending machines that would accept used games as trade-in towards future purchases. Well, now it looks like electronics giant Best Buy wants itself a little pieces of that action. Best Buy will be installing the E-Play kiosks at "several" Dallas and Austin, Texas stores.
"We believe that we have aligned ourselves with another industry leader in movies, games and entertainment," said Alan Rudy, chief executive officer of Columbus, Ohio-based E-Play, in a statement today. "We are eager to present our program to Best Buy customers who are particularly focused on choice and value, which are two key elements in the E-Play platform."
Trading in your used games to the machine will get you a voucher you can use towards any Best Buy item, which I take to mean a Best Buy gift card. I don't know how well the test at Wal-Mart went, but I guess it must have been successful enough that Best Buy wanted to try it out, too. We'll see if it takes off, or if GameStop will continue to have the highest stake in the used games market...
Best Buy Tests E-Play Game Kiosks [Video Business]
Wootini
Posted to Video Games on 24 June 2009
· Comments (4)
Other stuff like this: best buy, e-play, used games, wal-mart
I highly doubt it shall detract much from GameStop's total sells. GameStop is a store that caters to gamers/gaming peoples. BestBuy is a regular, though quite good, electronic store. GameStop has more games & equipment that BestBuy. So people that wanna buy games would most likey try go to a GameStop before a BestBuy. So, at most GameStop may lose some sales from people who causually & infrequently buy games, but it has a pretty large enough loyal/dedicated gaming customner number thing to absorb such lossess.
i think people who buy games for themselves are aware of places such as gamestop. however, for the huge chunk that buy games for other people, they usually get them at places that are not specialty stores. places like best buy and walmart. in fact many of the customers in the latter group don't even know there is a gamestop across the street from the best buy store in which i work. we also have a few local places that outdo gamestop as far as used gaming prices are concerned. i gotta be honest with, used gaming is not something that i want to come to best buy. it's not like we even have the resources or space to run something like that. now if we went with my idea of being more like sam's club where you have to take a card up to the register. i mean that has to cut down on theft, and if you think about, that used to be the only way you could get games. i really feel that gaming should have a dedicated checkout area for that soul purpose at best buy. but ah well, i don't run things, clearly.
A lot of it will come down to the trade values though. Best Buy can likely afford to give slightly better prices due to a bigger presence and wider product range, so they might do that in order to edge out Gamestop. If that does happen, ultimately, most people are just gonna go where they can get the most value. Being able to trade games for credit that can go to a wider range of products (instead of just more games) has an appeal too. Trading in a new used game and coming out with a couple of cheap DVDs or an iTunes card would be nice.
I think the Wal-mart test is still going, or at least, the trade-in kiosk is still operating in my local Wal-mart right next to the crane game and the bottle return machines.... not sure when phase 2 (actually selling the used games) might start, though. I haven't been on the selling end of the used game business very often at all but have bought used games since the 80s. More places to buy used games is better for everyone, even the publishers, though with short-term profit blinders on it'd be hard for them to admit it.