Next month, gamers will be faced with a hard choice, to be an early adopter or to wait for more games. And if they do choose to drop some cash on a next-gen system, they’ll have to figure out which of the two they want. Enter the kiosks!
Sony is, as you might expect, rolling PS4 kiosks out to its Sony Stores first, but don’t worry, you’ll get your chance to try the system out:
The initial units are being housed in Sony stores, with “thousands more” planned for other retail locations including GameStop, Best Buy, Target, and Walmart. Sony has launched a PS4 kiosk locator tool that will help you locate the nearest kiosk to where you are.
Since this is in public, the games featured will be pretty family friendly: Knack, Contrast, Super Motherload, Octodad: Dadliest Catch, and FIFA will be the games available to try out. The number of kiosks is estimated to be in the thousands, which isn’t really a surprise: Target, Best Buy, and Wal-Mart all want some of that sweet GameStop action, especially with the holidays coming up, and putting a kiosk in the electronics department will probably be a good way to sell the system to bored children while mom is browsing the Michael Buble CDs.
That said, Sony might want to work on their kiosk locator tool. I tried it out and it told me that the only Sony kiosk for 100 miles was located at a jewelry store down a side street near the highway. No offense to Earth Elegance Jewelry, but somehow I suspect that they don’t generally sell video games.
Either way, though, expect kiosks to start showing up, and quick, so keep an eye on the big box stores. Unfortunately, head to head comparisons won’t be possible; there’s no word on Xbox One kiosks going up before launch.