Will Red Box Succed at Renting Video Games?

Thanks to rental services like Netflix, Gamefly and Red Box the once popular Blockbuster has closed most of their stores. Since Blockbuster stores are going out of business, Netflix doesn't rent out video games and Gamefly has very poor service there is a big market for renting video games. Red Box has decided they are going to fill the video game rental void. Will Red Box be successful?

Red Box users will know that to rent a movie from Red Box it costs just $1.00 a night or $1.50 for a Blu-ray. Currently Red Box charges $2.00 a night for video game rentals.

The biggest reason that Red Box won't be successful as a video game rental service is because the average video gamer does not have the same mentality as a movie viewer. Movie viewers often decide to watch a movie on a whim. A few friends will be out, they'll have nothing to do and they'll decide, "let's rent a movie on the way home." Video gamers don't just decide, "let's play a game tonight", they buy or rent a game, have it over a period of time and play it a little bit at a time.

Another factor is that movies can be enjoyed in just one night. Video games can not be finished in just one night. Blockbuster had week long rentals and even those weren't a sufficient amount of days a lot of the time. Red Box's short rental times are not going to be compelling to video gamers.

Each night that the game is kept will cost $2.00. If a game takes a week to finish, and that is pretty quick for most people, then the user will owe $14.00 when the game is returned. Above I said that Gamefly's service is not very good but it is a better deal than Red box. If a video gamer is going to spend $15.00 on a rental then why not pay for Gamefly for one month and get to enjoy a game for four times as long?

Currently Red Box also has an awful library of games to choose from. First, there are only video games from the current generation of systems. That might not be a huge factor to most but I still enjoy playing my Playstation 2. Second, Red Box only offers recent games on those systems.

Want to play through Mass Effect 2 before Mass Effect 3 comes out? Tough luck. Mass Effect 2 isn't available and it's only one year old and probably the best game of last year. Red Box only offers the big releases too. Any gamer that wants an obscure game is out of luck.

It doesn't seem likely that renting video games on Red Box is going to catch on. Any gamers that want to play a video game for a day or two and don't mind choosing from a very select number of games that only includes current generation systems, games from the last six months and only the big releases will have a fine new option for them. The number of gamers that will actually want to rent a game under all of those conditions is probably less than ten percent though.