Right, which is related to but different from the article, which says that introducing a cheaper option drives people to spend less and choose lower quality for less money rather than paying a little more for better quality. But I am not disagreeing with the original point. I agree that Sony might have a motivation to get people to rent for shorter periods, such as encouraging willingness to try more games because of less money devoted to a single game. But I think the dominating factor is just being able to advertise below $5.
But there could be other factors, like making it such a bad deal that people feel better about themselves when they avoid it. In a traditional retail store, you often can choose between multiple brands of the same thing. Different video games have some pretty big qualitative differences, so you can't consider choosing between games to be the same as choosing between bleach. You can usually shop around different stores to find better deals and feel good about yourself about finding a better price. But with digital distribution, when you are the only store someone can shop at, there's no choice and no way to feel good about finding a good deal except for sales. With streaming, there might be occasional sales, but they probably want to keep prices pretty even, so they need to invent a bad deal to allow you to feel good about avoiding it.
I don't know if it will last though, and I bet the length will get extended, because seeing that your store is willing to offer you a really bad deal is probably worse than the benefits of feeling smart enough to avoid it.
Either way, I would much rather buy used games for $5 rather than rent them for any length of time.
> Either way, I would much rather buy used games for $5 rather than rent them for any length of time.
That goes without saying. Renting Digital Goods is just nonsense, because you can create a perfect digital copy for such a marginal bandwidth cost in the first place. The "added value" of renting is an extra layer of DRMs. I'm very glad Steam did not introduce any of this renting nonsense in their store.
I own way too many games that even at £5 a pop haven't given me £1/hr value. Renting would let me play a wide variety of games without spending that much.
Other the other hand, the 500 hours clocked on cs:go would be terrible value at any rental price.
I've always found the lack of a secondary market for digital goods interesting. If done wrong it would certainly screw the publishers, but a system like steam that already does have a market for their trading cards and some other in game purchases could implement a publisher tax. 25% of resale goes to the publisher or something of that ilk.
I am sure if I actually read the EULA it would state something about single party license that is not assignable.
But yeah, what if you let market forces control the price entirely? Launch day only release X copies and then Y copies every day after. Have a market bid system. Most games don't have long term value so prices would naturally decline over time. An interesting thought experiment.
> I own way too many games that even at £5 a pop haven't given me £1/hr value. Renting would let me play a wide variety of games without spending that much.
Then don't buy them :) I mean we are all guilty of buying games when they are cheap and bundled these days, but restraint is sometimes the better choice.
Note that before, to try games, we did not "rent" them, we had free demos... too bad that age is over. But Steam still have some "try X for free for 24 hours" kind of campaigns which is close enough.
