Image courtesy of CinemaBlend

Last spring Walmart and Best Buy made big news by announcing that they were entering the used game exchange business via a kiosk system. There were plenty of articles about what it meant for places like Gamestop and on-line game trading sites like Goozex. In the end, none of the hand-wringing and teeth-gnashing mattered much, as both companies have now stepped back out of the market, according to a report at MTV’s Multiplayer blog.

According to the article:

Walmart and Best Buy may have followed GameStop and Toys”R”Us and given the pre-owned games market the old college try, but it looks like they’re going to bow out due to disappointing results. E-Play, the company responsible for exchange kiosks placed at the retail locales has now suspended operations, according to E.Play.com, and Walmart and Best Buy will probably not be looking for new and better alternatives to replace them.

Revenue generated for Walmart and Best Buy from their experiment was “underwhelming,” Sterne Agee analyst Arvind Bhatia told IndustryGamers. He also said the the company’s kiosks would be “removed from the locations over the next few weeks.”

Of course, ‘suspended operations’ pretty much means that E-Play has tanked. So is this a failure for E-Play, or does it mean these companies have decided to kill the initiative?

The chance of another business partner stepping in to monitor the quality of used games being received seems unlikely if these two big players couldn’t make a system work, but second-round attempts may not be out of the question. GameStop’s system is solidly ingrained into their business model, and both Walmart and Best Buy have much larger operations to worry about.

Bhatia said that based on Walmart and Best Buy’s examples “it is clear the used games business is not an easy one to execute.” It certainly wasn’t for either of them anyway.

Another site that has a trade-in program is Amazon.com. While there hasn’t been much noise about the success or failure of that program on a larger scale, I have personally heard mixed messages from folks who have used it in terms of the time it takes, the inability to dispute if Amazon decides what you sent in is worth less than their quoted value, and the overall value compared to just trading in at GameStop (or better yet, using an online site such as Goozex).

There is some thought that recent moves that offered all customers of new games such as Dragon Age: Origins and Mass Effect 2 special DLC (downloadable content) might be having an impact on used game sales, since that content costs as much as $7 to buy for a second-hand game. Of course, this is the intent of such content … and it is working, if the reports are to be believed. At the same time, though, GameStop continues doing quite well with their high-profit used game program, so I guess it is a matter of time to know if DLC is really to blame.

So … did you ever try one of these stores (including Amazon and Toys R Us) for exchanging video games? If so, what was your experience?

Source: MTV’s Multiplayer blog