Media rental service Redbox has been poking at the edges of the game rental business for some time, but the company has now made good on its promise to take the service nationwide: this month, some 21,000 of Rebox’s 27,000 rental kiosks should be offering a range of game titles for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Nintendo Wii, with games renting for $2 per day.
Titles available for rental include a selection of games that tie in with recent movie releases as well as popular game titles like Call of Duty: Black Ops, You Don’t Know Jack, Just Dance 2, Red Faction: Armageddon, and the widely-panned Duke Nukem Forever.
Redbox has been experimenting with game rentals since August 2009, when it began offering a small selection of games at a limited number of kiosks as a test run. In October 2010 the company extended the service to 5,000 kiosks, and in April announced plans to extend the service nationwide. At the time, Redbox announced that it had rented more than 1 million video games at its trial locations.
Redbox’s nationwide game rental efforts put the company into direct competition with rent-by-mail services like GameFly, much the same way Redbox’s rental kiosks compete with video rental services like Netflix and Blockbuster.
