I think game rentals on full price new releases games is just wrong. It's practically piracy with regard to the harm it does to the industry.
And as someone who only buys games, it bothers me when someone rents a newly release game instead of paying full price for it. Just like it bothers me when people pirate games. I pay for games because I know that If people like me did not exist, this industry would not be able to make the games I want to play.
Publishers should be able to protect their property by restricting rental releases of their games. at least until a certain embargo date is passed. Just like films releases in cinemas will not become avaiable for rental until several months later. Newly released games should only be playable by us who pay the cost of entry. It's just not fair to us otherwise.
I'm gonna take the opposite stance here:
Game rentals are a necessity so long as companies fail to produce free downloadable demos for every game sold.
Reasons:
1. There's no other avenue for gamers to try and see if they like the game - unlike movies, which are FAR cheaper for the end-user comparatively, which are a limited experience - games are expensive and time consuming
2. Point in fact, developers (or marketing departments) routinely lie (call it hyperbole, stretching the truth, whatever) about features of their games. Without being able to really play and see these "features" - we'll never know what we're getting into. I mean, hell, if we were to go only on pre-release game shots and footage, it's damn near bait and switch tatics being used (speaking to "bullshots")
3. Games are unnecessarily expensive these days. This is totally our fault, when games jumped from 50 to 60 dollars, we kept paying it...but lets face it, we keep paying it - so they're just gonna get more expensive, so it's only fair that we have this system in place to insure that anyone can still have these experiences - This from someone who ONLY buys games by the way
How do game rentals "hurt" the game industry again? As I recall - rental outlets still pay full price for the game - it still counts as a sale (and shitloads more than is probably true, as my local Blockbuster will carry 20 copies of something compared to the 1 I might have purchased)
I get that there's certainly more revenue going to the rental outlets (as these games get paid for quickly and as quickly, turn into little profit centers) - but the developer still SOLD a game!
I'm willing to talk about a % of rental fee's allocated back to the company - but I'm certainly not going to advocate the game industry bending us over and forcing us to pay for stuff that we may not even like.
Jack
