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Industry News - Redbox to be everywhere!

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Redbox game rentals are going nationwide. As of now, the service is expanding to 24,000 Redbox kiosks, nicely located outside thousands of local grocery and convenience stores. Currently offering a wide variety of games at $2 per day, Redbox rents out titles for the DS, Playstation 2, Playstation 3, Xbox 360, and Nintendo Wii. Redbox.com currently features a section where you can look up kiosks by zipcode and see which titles each specific one has as well, which definitely cuts down on drive time searching for any specific title.

How well will this actually work? For someone who just wants one game, once in a while, this may be the best bet but a month of renting can reach the cost of flat out buying the game, unless the renter decides to switch it up with different games every week or so (which is very likely, as the majority of gamers can probably beat a game in way under a month). Furthermore, although gamers can best a game in under a month, generally it takes much more than one day or so to beat a game (not including the online multiplayer modes popular to games like Halo and Call of Duty) unless the person is so passionate as to maybe pull an all nighter playing but, in that case, those hardcore gamers may have already purchased the games themselves and are not looking to rent. And, for that matter, sites like GameFly allow renters to have one game at a time for as long as desired for $15.95 a month, equivalent to 8 days worth of gaming with Redbox. Therefore, Redbox's rental system will most likely work best for casual gamers who only want to keep a specific game for a couple of days, and don't intend on trying out new games for an entire month's span or more. All in all, however, Redbox's gaming rental system seems overpriced and many steps behind those of other companies, especially with potential new developments coming from Netflix, Google, and Apple in the future.

Written by Evil Ambassador Lindsey Olson