A few months back, I had lunch with a games retail buyer. We went to this great Mexican place and he recommended the Diablo Shrimp. Sh*t was so spicy that it made me cry like a little bitch. It was during this lunch that this buyer ran a question by me: What would you think about a used games vending machine? Just stick in a plain disc and get back either money or credit for another game from within the machine. If you’ve ever seen the Redbox DVD rental machines, you’ll have a good idea of what this would be like.
I said, no. No way. Gamers won’t do this. Gamers want the box. Gamers want to be able to see the game. I had a bunch of reasons why this wouldn’t work, but I guess my comments never made it to the top, as it seems that at least one retailer is going ahead with this vending machine.
Neocrisis has images of a Wal-Mart Video Games Buy Back vending machine that allows you to trade in your used PS2, PS3, Xbox 360, and Wii games. A scanner reads the game and compares it to a database. Unfortunately, due to bugs, they didn’t get any farther than this. Apparently Mirror’s Edge isn’t in its database. I didn’t even account for silly things like databases and bugs.
See, you should have listened to me.
Would you use a machine to trade in games?
