Renting Games...

What do you guys think about game rental services and what have been your experiences with the ones you've used?

I use Amazon for DVD's but since I decided to get a console I've been planning to switch to Tesco as their rental service for DVD's only is cheaper and more importantly you can rent games from the Tesco service too.

The economies of renting defiantly seem to stack up: For £15 a month you can have 3 disks at any one time and change them for new titles as often as you like (in practise I find 6 titles a month is practical, although you could do 9-10 if you really wanted). These can be Games, DVD's or HD movies. If I were buying I would have to spend twice that on one title which I probably wouldn't watch more than a few times and if I get a game I really do I like I can buy it later.

In a bit of news recently Amazon is selling its rental business to competitor Lovefilm who in turn power Tesco's offering. It's not clear what this means for customers yet though.

The only downside is waiting for a game to become available; I'm interested to see how long I have to wait to get popular games. At least with games they seem to be available as soon as they are released.

So far I don't miss having a stacks of discs around the place, even though it means I can't replay a game (but then I don't do that much) in fact I quite like having the additional space.

What have your experiences with game rental services been like are there better options than those I mentioned?

Or do you think renting is a waste of time and buying games is the best way to go?

Darkheart

I've been thinking about trying these out, as I usually don't play a game for more than a few weeks before getting bored of it anyway, so this looks like a good way to try out lots of games you never normally would buy .

Im not concerned about the idea, but how are you going to reach enough people?

I've used both german services (Gamesload and Metaboli)
I like the idea behind it as todays games often are crap in long time story or replayability and at the price of 1/3 of a game per months its definitely less expensive than buying 1-2 games each month just because you are through in 8-10 hours ...

I liked it when we had a subscription at work. 90% of games are rubbish, and it enabled you to find a couple worth keeping. Plus its nice being able to hold onto the game as long as you want without fines.

Means you can get a good RPG, take your time and finish it in a week or 2 and thats it. Since I never play my games through more than once, its almost perfect for me.

I usualy only buy games in order to support those that I feel worthy. By the time I buy them I'm mostly done with the game already, and impressed enough that I felt it was woth the money.


Blockbusters rents console games, and if its late you can buy the game at retail price minus the rental fee. Which is kind of cool.

I use Tesco's DVD rental (3 discs at a time) as you say powered by lovefilm which has just been bought by Amazon, for about 2 years now. Very happy with the service, no complaints.

I've never rented a game from them (costs 1 quid a month extra) though but from what I've seen it should be to the same standard as DVDs.

I turnaround 3 discs every week, at least, and it's quite possible to get two turnarounds a week of 6 discs (harder since the post office stopped Sunday pickup). I work on the rent-rip-return principle :-)

reminds me of when blockbusters started renting snes (and mega drive?) games out in the 90's
we had a branch down the road from me and i got a 2nd hand snes off one of my brothers mates
i had a very low wage job (yts type thingie something like £10 more than giro) or between jobs i forget so i had very few games to go with it but i could rent some now and then

a guy i worked with had a snes ripper and copied his rentals to floppies and ammassed a huge library thanks to blockbusters ... so envious of his toy

i think nintendo put up a stink at first as they were renting retail bought games and they tried and perhaps succeded in getting them to buy over priced 'rental' versions like they had to on VHS releases

The only reasonable way to play video games these days. Most games aren't long (and interesting) enough to play for more than a handful of times (with the possible exception of the Wii), so renting and/or netcafeing is definitely the way to go, depending on which games you enjoy playing.