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Will there ever be a generally accepted PC game rental system?

R

RedSwirl

Junior Member
The biggest reason why I still keep my consoles around is because you can't rent PC games. I've had to rent a lot of console games just to see if I want to buy it on PC. Yeah we have demos, but even today too many PC games don't have them.

What are the technical hurdles here? Are services afraid of people hacking the systems to get around rental expiration dates? Or does Steam figure its sales come often enough that the prices are essentially lower than what rentals would be? You'd think GameFly would be on top of this with its recent push into PC.
 
Onlive sort of it?

Though part of the problem there is you can't know how well a game will run on your computer. So, yeah, Steam weekends or them starting up a rental service proper is the only way we'll see it.
 
If game companies had their way, we wouldn't even have normal console renting, let alone PC renting.

Shame considering Steam has the backend for it with the Free Weekends that unlock then re-lock a game.
 
Free weekends, demos, and deep discount sales combine to do basically the same thing.

I mean, if a rental costs $7, and the game itself costs $5 to buy during a sale, what's the need for a rental service, right?

denshuu said:
Renting and buying at a discount are two very different things.
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No, he's talking about free weekends, where you get a weekend to play the game for free.
 
Wario64 said:
Steam weekends
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If you're talking about free weekends those kinda just pop up, but the recent one for Saints Row does prove that Valve can let you download a game temporarily to your account. It'd be nice if they let you do three day trials for any game for a certain price. I'd especially want this for new releases. Dishonored is coming out next week and I'm having to rent the Xbox version to confirm 100% if I really want to get it.
 
Stumpokapow said:
Free weekends, demos, and deep discount sales combine to do basically the same thing.

I mean, if a rental costs $7, and the game itself costs $5 to buy during a sale, what's the need for a rental service, right?



No, he's talking about free weekends, where you get a weekend to play the game for free.
Click to expand...

It's my policy to at least have 50% or 75% of the game playable in a demo. If they don't buy it after playing that much of the game, they weren't going to buy it after only getting to play 5% of it. If they like it, they'll buy it to finish the game off.
 
I wish. There are a lot of games out there that last about 6 hours and are more movie than game. I'm sick of paying $60 for a bad movie.
 
denshuu said:
Renting and buying at a discount are two very different things.
Click to expand...

You don't know what you're talking about. The Steam Weekends are 3-4 day periods that they let you play the full game for free, and if you like it you usually can get it at 50% off.

It's not a full blown rental system, but you're still essentially renting the game.


If Valve could come up with an actual rental system for Steam though, they'd be rolling in the Benjamins (not that they aren't already)
 
Steam sales are like renting a game and having zero late fees.

Otherwise people "rent" games from torrent sites. I doubt anything other than Steam or torrents could attract people.
 
I'd love this option if money from purchases would go to a publisher/developers.
 
gryz said:
Steam is already basically a rental service
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No "basically" about it. No ownership, just indefinite rentals, if the TOS update didn't make that already clear enough.

And with the sales, rental prices too.

The sales reveal the true worth of DD-only games. That's why iOS and Android games are so cheap too.
 
It's not exactly a rental, but Gamer's Gate has a thing called VOID where you can play games for "free" by watching commercials first. (Not the best selection, but a few games that I played)


But funny enough, the local library loans out PC games. Pretty much against the TOS, but they do it anyway. Mostly Nancy Drew games though.
 
DiscoJer said:
It's not exactly a rental, but Gamer's Gate has a thing called VOID where you can play games for "free" by watching commercials first. (Not the best selection, but a few games that I played)


But funny enough, the local library loans out PC games. Pretty much against the TOS, but they do it anyway. Mostly Nancy Drew games though.
Click to expand...

The one I worked at had Roller Coaster Tycoon and such. Lots of that era/type of PC games, definitely not anything that requires online activation.

Renting out normal video games was brought up a couple of times, but always gets shot down as "holy shit that's way too much money"
 
I used Metaboli for a very long time and was fairly satisfied with the service. Its basically a rental scheme where you pay between £7-13 a month for access to hundreds of games (over 900 on the 13 quid pack). But the problem was missing out on newer titles and slightly buggy releases due to the nature of how the games are stored on the PC.
 
Since it could kind of apply i guess i'll ask.


Why can't PC games just be played off the disc like a console?
I already know that that would be the worse way to play on the PC since it would mean no mods, slower load times, etc. Im asking just out of curiosity, since I know it's never going to happen.

I'm assuming it's the hardware (being different in every PC) that causes the need for installation?
 
FyreWulff said:
If game companies had their way, we wouldn't even have normal console renting, let alone PC renting.
Click to expand...
This. When I was younger I regularly rented PC games and this was pretty common. There was almost no difference between renting console games and PC games.
Only difference now is, that PC games usually have restrictions to specifically prevent reselling and renting, so I guess from the publisher's perspective everything is working as intended.

Jawmuncher said:
Since it could kind of apply i guess i'll ask.

Why can't PC games just be played off the disc like a console?
I already know that that would be the worse way to play on the PC since it would mean no mods, slower load times, etc. Im asking just out of curiosity, since I know it's never going to happen.

I'm assuming it's the hardware (being different in every PC) that causes the need for installation?
Click to expand...
Theoretically they could. But since every PC has a HDD and installing games is always better there is no need to put some effort to make the game playable straight from the disc. And even if they would, I doubt anyone would use this feature.
But in the early days of CDs on PC it was actually more common not to install the whole game. Many had options for different sizes of partial installs while reading the rest from the disc because most people didn't have HDDs big enough.
 
CopyCat said:
This. When I was younger I regularly rented PC games and this was pretty common. There was almost no difference between renting console games and PC games.
Only difference now is, that PC games usually have restrictions to specifically prevent reselling and renting, so I guess from the publisher's perspective everything is working as intended.


Theoretically they could. But since every PC has a HDD and installing games is always better there is no need to put some effort to make the game playable straight from the disc. And even if they would, I doubt anyone would use this feature.
But in the early days of CDs on PC it was actually more common not to install the whole game. Many had options for different sizes of partial installs while reading the rest from the disc because most people didn't have HDDs big enough.
Click to expand...

Ahh ok.
Thanks for that, I was thinking about it the other day and was just wondering.
 
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