Consoles went into wide distribution – Newspaper Kommersant No. 6 (7451) dated 16.01.

Services that allow you to rent electronics, at the end of 2022, noted an increase in demand for game consoles. Some landlords offer set-top boxes on which, due to the departure of their manufacturers from the Russian Federation, local stores are not available, complete with already configured foreign accounts. Marketplaces and retailers selling new devices, at the same time, note a decrease in demand and expect an increase in the popularity of bundles of consoles and games. Market participants note that the rental of electronics was gaining popularity even before the cessation of its official supplies to the country, and sanctions and restrictions spurred the process, primarily in large cities.

The demand for renting game consoles on the Avito free classifieds service grew by 43% in 2022, and the number of offers grew by 73%, the company told Kommersant. The Arenter service (renting equipment, including through MTS and Svyaznoy stores) noted that the demand for console rental from January 2022 to January 2023 increased four times, and for electronics rental in general – in 2.5 times. In the service of equipment rental Pauri, set-top boxes and augmented reality (VR) devices were named the most popular category of electronics: since September, the demand for consoles has grown by 27%.

Due to military actions in Ukraine, console manufacturers stopped deliveries to Russia and turned off regional digital stores, after which even large retailers began to sell subscriptions and vouchers intended for other countries (see “Kommersant” dated November 8, 2022).

Arenter independently sets up foreign accounts on consoles and pays for subscriptions to game catalogs, Yevgeny Shevelev, commercial director of the company, told Kommersant. “We made a comprehensive solution, so the product became more interesting for the consumer,” he said, adding that at the time of renting the console, Arenter offers to rent games on physical media. In Pauri, according to the site of the service, games on discs are rented both as a bundle with the console and separately. Users of classifieds, judging by the ads posted on them, mainly rent out consoles along with games – on disks, in a digital copy or on an already paid subscription.

The popularity of renting consoles has grown against the backdrop of a shrinking market for new devices – according to Kommersant, in Citilink in 2022 it decreased by more than 30% in monetary terms compared to 2021. The shutdown of digital stores for Russia has changed the structure of demand, “since the start of sales of the PlayStation 5 in 2020, the version without a drive was in special demand due to the lower price, after the brand left, interest shifted to the version with a drive,” the retailer added. Wildberries and Ozon also talk about the growing popularity of consoles with a drive, in the last marketplace they separately noted that they expect increased demand for sets of consoles and physical games in 2023. The only network polled by Kommersant that reported that a console without a drive (Xbox Series S) is being sold more actively than its counterpart with a drive (Xbox Series X) was M.Video-Eldorado, where it was associated with a more significant difference in price than PlayStation 5 variants.

Offers to rent a set of equipment – for example, from a console, games and several controllers – are logically in greater demand than offers to rent just a set-top box, Vyacheslav Lantsov, general director of the Polka rental ad service, told Kommersant. “It is unlikely that a person who rents a console will have their own games,” he said. At the same time, according to him, often not so much set-top boxes as gamepads and steering wheels are taken for a while. Restrictions on the supply of electronics to Russia in 2022 contributed to an increase in demand for rental of electronics in general, Mr. Lantsov noted, adding that “the understanding of the rationality, environmental friendliness and cost-effectiveness of renting those things that are rarely used appeared among residents of megacities much earlier.”

Yuri Litvinenko, Timofey Kornev