First of all, I love the concept of Redbox. After a busy day, you can visit a kiosk outside a grocery store or other retail establishment–which you would already visit anyway for other things–and pick up a movie or game rental for prices cheaper than your movie theater or buying a used game online. However, there is a huge problem with this, which has unfortunately hit me twice in a row while trying to rent Xbox 360 games, the most recent being this afternoon.

The first time I rented a game, I received a photocopy of a bar code on a piece of paper. The second time, I received a Blu-ray instead of a Xbox 360 game. (Redbox customer service confirmed that somebody transferred the bar code to a different disc). As I said, this has happened to me twice, and appears to be a problem while renting video games. A newly released video game is around $60, and new DVD’s are $20 or less. Obviously, there’s more of an incentive for fraud.

Does this LOOK like Black Ops 2 to you? How can Redbox be so stupid? Being put on hold wasn’t exactly my idea of Saturday night entertainment 🙂

Nope, this is NOT Tomb Raider for Xbox 360. I don’t know what kind of movie Prometheus is but I don’t own a Blu-ray player so I’ll never know.

In order to get any sort of satisfaction, you have to call the Redbox customer service line, get put on hold, then return the game. They’ll offer you some free rental codes for your trouble (or claim they will, I’ve only received them the first time), but if you’re going to rent another game there’s no guarantee you’ll end up with the same problem again.

In case anybody from Redbox stumbles upon this post, here are some free suggestions. I won’t even charge you a consulting fee 🙂

1. RFID tags embedded into the DVD itself during its manufacture – cannot be photocopied or removed without destroying the disk
2. Built-in DVD reader inside the Kiosk – read a file (or sector) from the disc every time a disc is returned, if the data doesn’t match the previously read values it’s either scratched or fake

Time is valuable, and I could have been playing exciting new games instead of dealing with customer service and ranting online. I guess I’ll have to read a book instead :O