Walmart jumping into the used video game market

[kainemaxwell]

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/new...hp?story=23674

Walmart has leased store space to third-party automated kiosk company E-play, which has released 77 “Video Game Buyback” stations at select locations, Walmart corporate told Gamasutra on Monday.

The machines are part of a very limited pilot program for Ohio-based E-play -- the kiosks are only found in 2 percent of Walmart’s 3,656 total U.S. stores.

Walmart corporate spokesperson Melissa O’Brien said in an email that E-play owns the machines, which reside in Walmart stores’ vestibule leased space areas.

She said the Walmart machines also carry movie DVDs and video game discs for Wii, Xbox and PlayStation platforms for $1 per day rentals, on top of accepting game discs that customers want to sell.

More at url link.

[garagesaleking!!]

i cant find a list of participating walmarts anywhere?

[NayusDante]

I read this on Slashdot yesterday. It's a novel idea, but it just has SO many flaws. I simply cannot see this being rolled out on a large scale.

The trade-in method is flawed beyond belief. If the machine "checks authenticity" of a disc, do they have licenses from Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo for the copy-protection scheme of their respective formats? Unless they do, we'll be seeing bootleg copies being traded in. Even with a drivers license check, people will be dumb enough to do it and it will cost more to prosecute than it's worth. Also, does the machine support multi-disc games? Can you cancel a trade at the last minute and get your disc back?

As for cases, you apparently just drop the case into a slot, a la Blockbuster returns. Trust me, people are going to think that you put the WHOLE GAME in there, then wonder why it's not giving them trade-in credit.

Perhaps the biggest concern is what happens to the games you insert. Obviously, this creates a part-time position (maybe a few hours a week) of pairing games with cases again, and sending the games wherever they go to be labelled. Do the games stay at the store they were traded to, or do they get shipped to a processing center? Will they charge differently based on completeness?

Perhaps this is not quite as important, but what about the return policy? Their current policy applies to unopened and opened software, so I'm sure that used software will need to be treated differently.

[Darren870]

Its like one thread down...

http://www.digitpress.com/forum/showthread.php?t=131741