Best Buy: We're Coming For You, GameStop

From PC World: Don't look now, but consumer electronics giant Best Buy plans to extend its Canada-based used video games pilot program to the U.S. First stop, Dallas and Austin (Texas) where, already this week, you'll be able to tinker with kiosks that scan your preowned games and feed back a voucher that puts dollars on a Best Buy gift card.

Blogs Best Buy CMO Barry Judge: "It’s a pretty slick system and one of the few trade-in programs to provide instant gratification; you get the gift card on the spot and can redeem it on anything in the store – not just another game."

"...some of the kiosks will even rent games and movies," he blogged, following with a few lines about "deeply passionate...customers" and "value propositions" and "more choice and value" which I've excised to spare you the needle-skipping predictability.

Prognosis? The Wall Street Journal reports GameStop shares fell as much as 7% after the news broke. Investors are nervous, in other words, because they should be.

That's because GameStop's virtual lock on roughly nine-tenths of the U.S. used games market is essentially availability-based. Mom and pop stores notwithstanding, GameStop is where you go to buy and sell used games because you can't go anywhere else.

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