Best Buy, Wal-Mart Used Game Kiosk Provider Shuts Down

Used Game Kiosk Back in May and June of 09 respectively, both Wal-Mart and Best Buy — two of the biggest videogame-selling retail chains in the nation — began experimenting with used games sales by using automated kiosks for consumers to trade-in titles and receive credit card or store credit. And now only a month into 2010, both experiments are over as kiosk-provider e-Play has closed its doors.

The reason for e-Play’s shut down isn’t clear, as their website offers the less-than-informative message, “e-Play, LLC has suspended operations. Thank you to all our customers.” But according to IndustryGamers, analysts never expected Wal-Mart’s or Best Buy’s experiments to make much of a dent in the used games market, and apparently that turned out to be the case. Sterne Agee analyst Arvind Bhatia called their business “underwhelming,” and said the kiosks would be turned off and “removed from the locations over the next few weeks.”

So does this mean Wal-Mart and Best Buy are done with the used games market for good? Hard to say, but as Bhatia noted, “it is clear the used games business is not an easy one to execute.”