Study Finds Game Rentals Not Helping Game Sales

[Andy Chalk]

Study Finds Game Rentals Not Helping Game Sales

A new study by Frank N. Magid Associates [http://www.magid.com/index.asp] into the habits of console gamers has found that game renters do not necessarily make good game buyers.

The study found that teenagers were particularly fond of renting games, accounting for nearly 30 percent of game renters despite making up only 12 percent of the population. But of more interest to game publishers is the finding that almost 50 percent of gamers said they purchased none of the games they had rented over the past year. Only 9 percent of the respondents claimed to have bought at least 11 percent of the games they rented over that period.

Most gamers who took part in the survey said they did not buy a game after renting it because it either wasn't very good, or was too short. Detailed responses to the study, which looked at 257 people, are available at GameDaily.com [http://www.gamedaily.com/articles/news/game-rentals-eating-into-purchases--magid/18656].



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[korosora]

*echem* duh?

isn't this obvious?

 

[Goofonian]

exactly, isn't the point of renting so that you don't have to buy the game?

 

[Lord Scottish]

This just in: Sun hot.

Did they really expect 12 year olds to be buying up all these games? As fickle as most kids are, renting is the only viable option for a parent (who IS paying for them) to supply a wide variety of games.

 

[Cynical Nonoplace]

Well woopdee-fucking-doo.

 

[dnv2]

Not to mention the fact that more and more games are being produced these days that have no replay value at all, so it's cheaper to just rent, finish and take back.

 

[Katana314]

Here's why:
Thanks to console retardation (we were going to have 5 enemies here, but now we have one. And he's not facing you) as well as the shorter length of games (It's an "episode") everyone has already BEATEN them. And often there's not enough incentive to keep playing it after the rental period (such as a decent multiplayer mode)

 

[Lightbulb]

I think thats the thing though, to us its obvious, to devs maybe not...

If i could rent PC games i certainly would. I used to rent SNES games back in the day because i couldn't afford to buy them all the time. Some were rubbish and some were great - i picked up great ones in bargain bins if and when i saw them.

 

[brewbeard]

Gamers generally fall into three major categories (with some intermixing) when it comes to acquiring new games.

1. Pirates: Either can't afford to buy games/don't see the point in paying for what they can get for free. Some pirate games when they come out to see what they're like, then purchase the title later if they feel it's worthwhile.

2. Renters: Either can't afford to buy games or want to try them out before purchasing them. Maybe they buy lots of games and rent the ones they want to experience but don't feel are important enough to own. Some crazy people rent games multiple times until they might as well have bought it in the first place.

3. Collectors: If a game is worth playing, it is worth owning. These folks want to be able to whip out any of the games in their library at a moment's notice in case they get the urge to play them again. Sometimes it's a status thing, especially in the case of rarer titles, where gamers collect lots of usually old out of print titles to complete their collections.

Of course the recent trends in gaming seem to favor casual titles that are 10-20 hours long with a major storyline that offers very little in the way of replayability. This decreases the likelihood that people will think a game is worth buying, making renters out of buyers. There aren't very many games like the CRPG's of old that contain hundreds of hours of playtime anymore. Even modern RPGs are becoming shorter, with a few exceptions that usually rely on massive amounts of randomly generated content. This is due to many factors, but most of them can be chalked up to time-cost-intensive production costs in the trend to next-gen graphics and dialogue. Everything's gotta be pretty these days and have voice overs or many people won't give it a moment's thought, and even with this stuff, unless a game has online multiplayer functions or is a party game, it's generally very short-lived.

 

[TheLostSkeleton]

I'm SHOCKED!

I remember reading about stuff like this a couple years ago, but it was from the rental place's perspective; apparently places like Blockbuster never receive many copies of a popular game because the publisher wants to force people to buy the game rather than rent it. It was specifically discussed in reference to Resident Evil 4, and how when it first came out on the Gamecube, most rental places only had a couple copies they could use for rental services.

Capcom specifically only allowed them use one or two copies of the game, because RE4 was expected to sell very well and Capcom didn't want people to rent it and hurt sales.