Renting Games (The Follow Up)

Just thought I'd post an update on my experience after ~3 months of using Tesco's Game/DVD Rental service. Basically I can't recommend it enough:

In the past 3 months I've rented about 20 films and 7 Xbox 360 games, a mixture of titles stuff for me and the kids.

I did find that I had to remove any DVDs from my list in order to stand a good chance of getting games but it's easy to put them back in again.

I've had the following games, all these games had good reviews and I would have considered buying them:

Virtual Figher 5 Online (Poor)
The Darkness (Average)
Dead or Alive 4 (Bad)
Mass Effect (Very Good)
Burnout Paradise (Awesome)
Virtua Tennis 3 (Above Average)
Devil May Cry 4 (Good)

Playing these games and movies would have cost 100's of pounds to buy and I've basically had all the benfit of this for less than £45 and I've still got the shelf space, can re-rent anything I want to play again and don't feel bad about the ones I that I didn't like (just sent them back quickly).

To date I've receievd pretty everything I wanted to play, sometimes I had to wait a day or two for allocations but it's no biggie. In fact I've usually had a little more than I need to play or watch. Right now I seriously doubt I will ever buy another console game.

Darkheart

When I had an Xbox I used to rent games from Blockbuster. Was probably the one thing that made it possible to pick out the good games, and try before you buy affordably.

If they are really good and can be finished in about 10 - 12 hours, you can often finish them within a one weeks rental saving a heck of a lot of money too :).

Evak,
The thing I really like about these postal systems is it's so much less hassel than Blockbuster or similar. You can have anything for as long as you want, no fees, just drop it in the pre-paid post when you've finished and wait for the next item on the list to turn up (1-3 days).

Darkheart

here in the US blockbuster have a postal system though, with 1 free game and you can pick up and drop off vids and games in store if they have what you want in stock or don't want to post. You get 1 free game a month with Blockbusters postal rental system.

I currently use Netflix because they have about 90,000 DVD's. A far bigger selection that includes a lot more obscure ones.

Game rental is by far the best way to go whichever way you look at it. Most games just arent that great, and you can't tell from a review till you try for yourself.

i think just playing demo's gives me enough of an idea if i want to buy a game for 360 or not, no need for rentals for me.

Sinu I disagree for these reasons:

Demo's often arn't that representative of the full game usually because they either don't give you enough or give you too much.

For example the demo for "Burnout Paradise" is very poor and completely unrepresentative of how good the game really is. It should have included at least one of each type of game mode but that would have probably made it too big. "Devil May Cry 4" also suffers from a poor demo.

Some games just don't lend themselves to demos; how would you demo "Mass Effect", for example?

Also I would argue that renting is not just a pre-cursor to buying but actually a total replcaement for buying the game. Once you've completed the game to your satisfaction why do you need it on your shelf? 25 years of playing games has taught me that once something goes "On the Shelf" that's where it tends to stay. Only in a very small number of cases (<5%) do I go back and play something again (in which case you could just stick it back on the rental list).

If you add these features to the economic arguments I think it's difficult to find a reason to buy games.

Darkheart

Rental is great I'm sure, but its not that good for casual multiplayer type games that you just want lying around for when you or your kids have friends over.

Gonna see if I get LoveFilm to actually send me some games, they haven't managed it so far.

Beaker,
Tesco is just Lovefilm under a different name and (bizarrely) a bit cheaper, the only way to get games is not to have any DVDs listed otherwise they will usually send you the DVD straight out no matter what your preference is. If you think about it that's pretty logical, DVDs have a much lower turn-around time than games so there is much more likely to be a DVD you want available rather than a game.

Unfortunatly the system is not a "disk on demand" system (although I think we will see some of those soon enough) so if you have other non-game titles they can send you you will usually get those.

Change your list to all games (I just export my list to Excel first) then you will probably have a day or two where your status is "awaiting allocation" then you will usually get what you asked for. Once you've got the games you want, re-import your list.

Darkheart

If always been mening to try this out :o) Thanks for putting it back in my head.

Oh, forgot to mention with Blockbuster in the US now, if you rent a game or movie, and you decide to buy it from them they discount the rental from the retail price. So you actually rent the game for free if you buy it.

One of the nice things about two big competing businesses duking it out for the same customer pool :).

Sadly people in the EU usually get a worse deal with all things IT/Entertainment realted. I think US customers just take less crap and are more honest about it myself.

Darkheart