Rental Possibility for PC games?

[Siyano_v1legacy]

After reading a lot on the topic of "Should I pirate the game to see if I can run it on my computer" and the trouble developer have to hurdle to make a demo. I was wondering what if developer started some kind of way to give rentals of their products?

One of the idea I have thought is something along the line of a "safe deposit" combined with some kind of rental fees

Say a AAA games its going out, not sure you are going to like it or not, you can either buy it and suffer the loss if you don't like the game, can't play the game, don't like the restrictive DRM or whatever, then you just suffer the lost of the 60$

The idea would be something along the line of "deposit" an amount around 55$, then a rental fees of say 5-10$, then depending on various factors of how much you played (in game time) in a certain numbers of day (real life time), then you either have to pay the price of that 55$ or then you just wasted that rental fee of 5-10$ and get back your 55$, after all the developer would eventually get 5-10$ per person that wasn't sure or a lot of person that just wanted to test the game for any kind of purpose plus the huge number people already paid the full price no matter what

Also the developer could add some few incentive of paying the full price right away such as goodies in the game or something similar
Additionally they should add more and more incentive when you buy more and more from them, even my coffee shop does it!

What your thought?

 

[distortedreality]

No renting system would be viable, because once a game is on your computer, if you really want to be able to keep it without paying for it, you can, which is why PC rentals disappeared in the first place.

The only way that a rental system would work would be with something like OnLive, but i'm not sure how many people are buying/would buy into that.

Demos are the way to go - apparently most publishers haven't figured this one out yet.

 

[Beautiful End]

What was said above.That's why people and retailers don't buy/sell pre-owned PC games. That and the fact that they all come with a unique code that cannot be duplicated or used again ever again.

But I see your point. In a perfect world, I suppose it could work. However, MMOs already do something like that with their subscription fee. You like the game? Good, keep paying. You don't like it? Fine, don't pay and of course you don't play the game anymore.
Another way it could work would be, as mentioned above, to have some sort of live demo. You know, go to said site, play the demo for this amount of time and that's it. Or give away codes to download just a version of the game (demo) into their computers. But they would have to be real careful with that because, ya know, hackers and mods.

 

[DoPo]

Well, there is also what Steam does - free weekends. You get the game for a weekend, so you can play it and see how it is. On the downside, free weekends aren't that common and you don't really have any say over which game gets one. But it's a starting idea, at least. I can sort of see that being not-too-hard to do with existing DD services like Steam/Origin/Capsule/etc. People get a "demo", that is the full game to play with for a while. You could make it one-off thing - some game you can request to try out and you'll get a couple of days to play them, or maybe a set amount of in-game time (whatever is more appropriate for a given game) or something. So yeah. The platforms can even add additional restrictions, if they feel the feature would be abused - say, you can only get so many demos for a time or something.

Of course, alternatively, you can have actual demos. That is certainly another option.