Redbox Abandons Video Game Rental Business: Kiosks Will Now Offer Only Movies

[Tsing]

Interest in physical media continues to wane. Following some murmurings on social media, Redbox has confirmed to The Verge that it is exiting the game rental business. Unless it's a movie they're after, gamers no longer have any reason to visit the company's rental kiosks (but they do have until the end of the year to buy games from them).

The change is disappointing for gamers who relied on Redbox as a convenient way to rent games. With Redbox no longer offering rentals, and the death of rental stores like Blockbuster (there’s only one left in the world), there just aren’t many local places to casually browse and rent a game anymore.

 

[Burticus]

It is because Redbox is getting scammed to death by *******s. They were making paper copies of the game disc and returning it. I have no idea how Redbox could not track it back to the original offender... but apparently they could not. There are entire reddit threads about it.

Getting ripped off with a $20 movie is one thing, a $60 video game is another.

Plus the game streaming services now offered by majors are making an impact apparently.

Redbox could fix this by putting RFID tags on the game discs, using cameras to record the offenders, and by aggressively pursuing legal action against them. They chose to do none of those. Do you think BB or any other rental place back in the day would put up with this? Hell no. I have relatives who had their credit all screwed up from BB and other video stores filing (likely justified) claims against them back in the day. Now... I guess no one cares.

I don't miss BB exactly, but I do miss the rental video/game store experience (Gamestop doesn't count, they can rot in hell). I notice smaller towns I drive through still have video stores (likely sh!tty internet in the area, or people who just cannot afford it). I think it could still be viable.