Why is renting games legal?

[dunno001]

bardicverse said:

Well put, good points. What would be interesting is with cloud computing like OnLive wants to do, that gaming might become like an "on demand" service. You won't own the game, but can rent them, play them, and be done with them. If you want to play again, you order them on the "on demand" service, which in effect is like a digital rental service no different than Pay per View.

Truthfully, I think it would be a stupid idea to try to move to a pay-per-play system only for games. People are attached to their physical objects, so the first barrier, which is possible, is getting things to go online only. The second barrier would be for them to give up any "ownership" of the item. I do not see this barrier happening. If I like something, I want to be able to buy it. For gaming, I tend toward many of the longer games. If I found an RPG I liked from a rental, I would buy it. If I were told that I have to keep paying to play it, and couldn't play it as I wished, when I wished, I wouldn't even bother. I would represent lost revenue.

Don't get me wrong, though, I'm not against the idea of a timed rental, as long as I still have the option to purchase. And I don't see it as being in anyone's best interest to move to rental only. The current preorder system is good- retailers sell new copies of the game to unsuspecting buyers, unbeknownst if it is any good or not. If that new game sucks, 25,000 preorders become 23,000 single rentals and 2,000 who might be willing to pay again, but not enough people will stick around to make the game as much as those sales would have. Or, say a new game is really popular. I'll take Halo in this case. If Microsoft were to say that Halo 4 would be pay-to-play only, how would it do? I'm sure its first month or so would be great. But things would die off. Gamers would lose the ability to just decide to pick up the game and play it for a bit for fun without paying, so it would not be played. And, worse yet for Microsoft, some people would decide that paying for both the game and Live isn't worth it, and cancel both in the process, resulting in the double hit of less money from that person for the game AND Live revenue.

Perish the thought that this takes off, gamers will lose even more in the end. Companies will sit around and leech off of their couple of big games that suckers (yes, that's what I think they are) keep paying for them. They have no incentive to make a new game, since the new game won't see as much revenue as their current ones. And if it's a fan of a company, that company releasing a new game would cause a lost revenue stream from one of their other games. Again, I'll go back to Halo. So H4 was pay-play. So is H5. H5 would kill the revenue stream for 4, thus making it just not worth doing at all. Or even Nintendo. The next Smash Bros is a pay-play. Fine. Then Metroid Prime 4 is released. They stop paying for SB? for MP4. New games will spread the market too thin, to the point where it just won't be worth developing a game, and this will cause horrible stagnation.

Of course, there's the issue also of getting these systems to the consumer. I don't see stores wanting to sell a system with a horrible margin for themselves when they can't attach anything onto it for more profit. This would kill off stores like Gamestop (what you think of them is irrelevant), and many other stores that do look at margins, like Best Buy, would also not carry them. Thus, it would shrink the market from the getgo, ignoring the further shrinkage of people like myself who would be opposed to a rental-only case. Sure, you could argue that it would be done later, when the market is half a billion worldwide. But costs will be so out of control by this point that it couldn't support a market of half that size.

Which brings me to the cost issue. A lot of us here tend to buy more games than the average consumer. So what would this pay-play cost? $5/week seems like a number they would like, even if it's expensive compared to the current Netflix. This means that over 13 weeks (3 months), we would pay $65 for a game. But how many other games have come out in that quarter? For us at this site, who play a fair number of games, something else would be released that would catch our attention, and we'd start playing that instead. That is, if we've not already beaten the game. Or if we didn't switch games, more than 1 game that we'd be interested in could come out, and we might forget about one of them, resulting in no money at all for that developer for it. And I'd say that it's safe to assume that the casual player wouldn't be interested in the game after 3 months, letting the rentals lapse before this period of time passes. In either case, the company gets less money from us. But why do we lose out? In addition to potentially forgetting about a game, it means we'll be less inclined to remember why a game was good. We won't "have" said game, and with it now being buried in a list of games, will be less inclined to do so, let alone pay again to do so. And sequels? We won't hype ourselves with its prequel to remember what we liked about it, unless the leadin time is so short that one could even ask why bother, if a new one will be out so soon. And the older games that a company no longer deems worth has having up, we lose all access to. I'll take away, say, Kid Icarus 3. Not enough people are still playing it to make it worth keeping up. We all will lose, because now NOBODY can play this game again.

I'm sure that the companies don't care much for the rental stores, and I would even welcome them in starting a rental system themselves. But if that ever becomes my only option, that company gets no more of my money. The revenue from the purchase stream is just too great to throw out the window in hopes of a longer but smaller rental stream which won't be maintained. Oh, and don't get me started on having to maintain all those older games for the handful of people who would want to keep playing them.