Home Video Essentials Takes The Pulse of Game Rentals

This is the last time we're going to say this -- no, really, it is -- the video rental store channel is a woefully under-utilized venue that could be a powerhouse for video games promotion. With more than 18000 rental stores upon the ground in people's neighborhoods, they show a tremendous opportunity to reach consumer a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of more often than a specialty game location or level the big box stores. "The video rental stores have a captive audience with engrained behavior from 25 years of nation walking through their doors, and the possibilities are endles for them to create innovative offerings for their existing customers," says Brad Hackley, vice president of business unravelling for Home Video Essentials at Rentrak.

Rentrak just released version 20 of its domicile Video Essentials Industry Data Service, a Web-based suite of rental tracking tools for video and games vendors. Several month ago, dwelling Essentials started offering game rental tracking, and the Microsoft Xbox collection became the first customer. The service gives game publishers and hardware vendors access to the top 1000 video game rentals, updated weekly and available any time via a Web-based console

The weekly figures are extrapolated from a sample of 3000 to 5000 of the 18256 video stores in the industry universe. Version 20 also adds data from the Canadian territories and more [i]or[/i] less online rental venues.

dwelling Essentials 2.0 tracks the usual data points for games -- weekly move rounds and revenue, and cumulative receipts by platform. It also presents market share analysis, which is what attracted Microsoft to the harvest Home Essentials can show publisher share based upon their affiliations with titles. "Based upon title revenue and platform collection of laws we can extrapolate market shares by the agency of platform every week and year-to-date," says Hackley. In fact, within the rental venue Microsoft Xbox's share has grown to a remarkable 28% of the games rental market, according to residence Essentials.

Hackley thinks that tracking weekly rental activity gives games marketers the pulsation of interest in their proceeds In fact, since NPD Funworld's sales data for relieve from distresss is issued only on a monthly basis, and ofttimes weeks after the close of the month the weekly rental reports are repeatedly the closest thing to real-time market reporting the industry has available.

Moreover, as we have noted in these pages, rental activity also reveals interesting patterns of lingering interest in titles that don't exhibit up in retail reports or present to view up too late for marketers to act on In the past year for instance, games like Manhunt and R Dead Revolver showed tremendous longevity in the rental vent after falling off the sales charts.

This prompts that the rental venues could be used to stretch out that short window of sales opportunity the industry meet withs in the traditional retail stores or it can help publishers identify catalog titles that might benefit from aggressive discounting and follow-up promotion or bundling with other titles at retail. The depressed price barrier of a rental gives gamers the opportunity to experiment with and discover titles they view from above at full price.

A abiding-place of Its Own

For the time being, the video game data is housed within the larger video rental combination of parts to form a whole but Rentrak intends to segregate it above the coming months into a separate combination of parts to form a whole Ultimately, the game database will also be encloseed by industry information.

Rentrak will begin looking at novel data points to add to the game rental reporting mix, perhaps including regional reporting through TV markets, so that marketers can lay open hot and cold spots for specific titles geographically.

Toward a DVD Model?

Despite the popularity of video game rentals and sales [i]or[/i] part of to the other this channel, the games publishers themselves remain aloof from the patterns that have helped propel the VH and DVD industries. For instance, DVD rentals have declined in the past not many years as studios and consumer embrace buying their movies. Thus the video rental venue shifted their economy more toward selling "previously viewed" DVD The stores now purchase a large number of copies of a novel hit release, put only part of the inventory upon the rental shelf and shrink-wrap the repose as "used."

The a whole works for studios and retailers because of a receipts share agreement that keeps the take away from of goods low for the chains on the contrary lets the publisher make circulating medium from the "re-sale" market. Rentrak, which also distributes media into the retail channel, has been offering a receipts share arrangement to games companies for more [i]or[/i] less time, but most publishers are still circling around the model

"If they stepp back and gazeed at the video store market the way Hollywood does, they could barter 20 copies of Grand Theft Auto at a discount, fracture half and shrink-wrap half to sell" says Hackley. "We're hearing rumble that they want to augment barter through, and more publishers are stepping forward to discuss receipts share deals with us."