Redbox Games Boss: Wii Games, Mid-Range Sellers Thriving At Kiosks

Redbox says that video games are performing well at its disc rental kiosks since it added the service earlier this year. "It's nice to see that positive response," the company's video game VP Joel Resnik tells Gamasutra, following the company's announcement of 4 million game rentals in 2011. "In August, we added an additional 5,000 kiosks," Resnik says, bringing the number of Redbox kiosks that offer video game rentals up to about 27,000. Primarily, Wii games are seeing the highest rental rates at the kiosks, Resnik says. "[The Wii] has the highest install base, and our consumer is a casual gamer, and they've responded very well," he says. While the company only has about six weeks of analytics to weigh so far, it expects the positive momentum to continue. In the company's fourth quarter it plans to increase its focus on the core consumer, Resnik continues. "From an inventory perspective, this is very different from the traditional brick and mortar rental, where a store has about five to 10 copies of a game available to try. 67 percent of America is within a five minute drive of a Redbox kiosk," he says. That means that although individual units don't necessarily keep deep stock reserves, customers can use the Redbox mobile app to find which kiosks near them are stocking the product they want, and can even reserve it in advance before physically getting a title from a kiosk. Managing a rental inventory is far different than at traditional retail, Resnik says. "The best-performing products for us maybe are in the middle grade from a sales perspective," for one thing. The company manages kiosk inventory using a broad variety of sales metrics that even depend on the markets in specific locations in the country. And despite anxiety about physical game media amid the digital transition, Redbox is encouraged by its own positive trends. "Our company feels very comfortable with the life of DVD or Blu-ray and other physical media, and how long we believe physical media will live from a business perspective," he says. "From the perspective of console-based gaming, physical media is the lion's share of it," he says. "Download is the next most feasible business solution... but consumers look at Redbox as a physical media kiosk rental-driven solution. Until we have that base in place and are able to engage people that way, we're not thinking about engaging them through any other model." "Are we interested in other business models? Absolutely," says Resnik, noting that while video games are a new territory for Redbox, the company has begun focusing on a digital movie strategy for this year. "It's something you can't ignore, but I think our business looks at it and considers physical media a really big opportunity in how people feel best about engaging," he concludes.