REDBOX TO OFFER GAMES IN KIOSKS; GAMESTOP TO START STREAMING GAMES 'EVERYWHERE'

Redbox's famous red disc-dispensing kiosks will start spitting out video games starting on June 17th, offering titles for the PlayStation3, Xbox 360, and Nintendo Wii for $2 per day.

The new game rentals have been in testing at about 5,000 locations around the country for some time now, but Redbox says they’re finally ready to expand the program to their other 21,000 kiosks. According to the press release, video games will be introduced at the same time as Blu-Ray discs at Redbox locations nationwide. “Redbox will make discovering the latest games as easy as a trip to the local grocery, convenience, or drug store,” according to Redbox’s VP of Games, Joel Resnik.

Meanwhile, GameStop's Spawn Labs' offers a cloud-powered game streaming service, enabling users to enjoy their favorite console games on connected devices with substantially less horsepower. Back in March, Spawn was acquired by retail giant GameStop — and it looks as though you might soon be playing Xbox 360 or PS3 games on your Android tablet as a result.

Joystiq has discovered several job postings which are aimed at developers who can help the company port Spawn’s player software to Android and Linux. As an added twist, GameStop is also hoping to put its acquisition of Impulse to good use when its “new consumer interface” for Spawn is ready to rock.

Impulse is a digital content distribution service like Steam, and it even sports the unsurprisingly similar domain name impulsedriven.com (compared to steampowered.com). GameStop President Ton Bartel foresees pairing Spawn and Impulse in order to offer users the ability to stream its library of 1000-plus games on-demand.

GAMESTOP BUYS IMPULSE AND SPAWN LABS, SAYS IT IS BECOMING "TECHNOLOGY COMPANY"

It looks like GameStop's plans following its acquisition of Impulse and Spawn Labs may be even grander than we had suspected. At an investor conference today, GameStop said flat out that it is "becoming a technology company," and that it does indeed plan to introduce a cloud-based gaming service similar to OnLive as a result of the Spawn Labs acquisition, while Impulse will be used to "compete fiercely" with Steam. But that's just the start of things.

According to the Dallas Morning News, GameStop also plans to expand the gaming service to a variety of mobile devices, and it's apparently even entertaining the idea of a GameStop-branded tablet, saying that "if we feel like we could do a better job of making a tablet, we'll do that." Of course, some of that is still quite a ways off, but GameStop will be taking its first steps fairly soon -- it's already showed off a demo of how the service will be integrated into its website (see above, complete with a "try it now" option), and it plans to begin a public beta sometime this year before rolling out the full service early next year.