Best Buy tests E-Play game kiosks

PHYSICAL: Several Texas stores allow game trade-ins, DVD rentals

By Danny King -- Video Business, 6/23/2009

JUNE 23 | PHYSICAL: Best Buy will test self-service kiosks that allow for videogame trade-ins, indicating that the largest U.S. electronics chain may be looking to challenge specialty videogame retailer GameStop.

Best Buy will install the machines at “several” Dallas and Austin, Texas, stores, Barry Judge, the company’s chief marketing officer, said on his blog today. E-Play, which reached an agreement for a similar pilot program with Walmart last month, will make the kiosks, Best Buy spokeswoman Erin Bix said.

By installing machines that allow customers to trade in used games for vouchers that can be used for any Best Buy item, Best Buy is jumping into the used-games market that has been a profit center for Grapevine, Texas-based GameStop. Earlier this year, Amazon.com started testing game-exchanges.

“As we continue to explore new ways to make our customers happy, Best Buy is moving into the used-games market,” Judge wrote on his Web site. He added that stores with the machines will start selling used games, and some of the machines will offer $1-a-night videogame and DVD rentals.

Last month, E-Play installed machines at 77 Walmart stores in New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island as part of a pilot program. Those machines allow users to exchange Nintendo Wii, Microsoft Xbox and Sony PlayStation games for credit on their credit cards. In Walmart stores that don’t have a Redbox kiosk, E-Play’s machines will offer $1-a-night DVD rentals.

“We believe that we have aligned ourselves with another industry leader in movies, games and entertainment,” Alan Rudy, CEO of Columbus, Ohio-based E-Play, said 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.”

Last July, NCR, the world’s largest automated-teller-machine maker, bought a minority stake in E-Play in an agreement that the companies said would add several thousand DVD-trading self-service machines at U.S. retail locations within the next few years. E-Play, which doesn’t disclose total units, also has machines in some Walmart stores in Canada.