Another shark enters the fray, seeking easy prey among the swimming schools of Madden and EA sports titles. Best Buy, the second greatest evil after the now-defunct CompUSA, has expanded its Canadian testbed efforts to the US, offering game trades through a kiosk system. Slip in your old game, let the kiosk scan it, then punch the go button and get back a Best Buy gift card. Guess they don’t trust us gamer types with real money.
This move must also come as something of an attack on publishers and the various content cartels, who have been tirelessly working to make the secondary market go away. With another high-dollar vendor on the used game tip, it’ll be harder to legalize used games out of existence. They’ll have to try something else, likely vile technology scarred into the disks by a red hand dipped in evil. We all know how well that’s worked for the record companies.
I’m curious to see how the system works in practice. Out here in the really-real world, not every used game is worth the same price. Like, a original Final Fantasy 7 is a treasure and an heirloom compared to say, Madden 2006, so how does the Kiosk know what you’re feeding it? Will you get the same price for every game? Will it take burned copies? Or did Best Buy just roll out the perfect way to clean the shelves of those old sports games that clutter and creep like the leaves of an approaching Autumn?
If you got the answers, feel free to chime in.
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