Silent’s savvy sales strategy or dumb distribution dilemma?

I took a trip to Blockbuster tonight to return Lego Batman (which I do NOT recommend, but that’s for another post) and to see if they had Silent Hill: Homecoming available to rent.  I took a brief look around the store and didn’t see a case for it, so I asked an employee if they had it.  She checked a few places but then concluded that they did not.  Not just that they didn’t have it in stock, but they actually didn’t carry it.

I was disappointed, but figured maybe the nearby, larger blockbuster carried it.  They called and it was the same story: they didn’t carry it.  I thought it was rather strange since the game has been out about a week now and is somewhat of a moderately hyped game in a long-running series, so after getting in my car I called one more nearby blockbuster to see if they had it.  The guy I spoke to knew exactly what game I was talking about as soon as I mentioned it and was actually quite enthusiastic about it, but then went on to say that he was disappointed that, for some reason, they just didn’t get any copies from the publisher.

“Did any blockbuster?” I asked.

“As far as I know, no.” He responded.  “The publisher just didn’t send us any copies to sell or rent. My buddy was forced to run out and buy the game from somewhere else because we didn’t get any.”

“Are you getting it any time soon?”

“No, not that I know of.  We don’t have a date for it.”

Silent Hill: Homecoming is getting mixed, but overall somewhat positive reviews.  It may not be the massive success that the original games were, but it looks like it may be a decent enough entry in the popular series.  It’s also a single-player game that, from what I’ve read, may take about 10 hours to complete. There’s nothing particularly wrong with a 10-hour single-player game, but needless to say, a lot of people could rent the game and finish it up within the rental period.  I could be wrong, but I don’t think that Blockbuster has the same deal with game publishers that they do with movie studios as far as profit sharing for rentals, so Konami gets no money from rentals outside of the cost of just selling the game itself to Blockbuster.

So, my question is this: could Konami be intentionally withholding their game from the rental markets to, as the Blockbuster employee explained to me, “force” people to buy the game instead, at least during its first few weeks of release?  Or am I reading too much into this and this is just an example of either Blockbuster or their distributor being stupid and not keeping up to date with the latest game releases?