Should gams with non-revocable installs be classified as rentals?

And I'm talking officially here, as in clearly marked "rental" on the packaging?

Last week I installed Alpha Centauri on a laptop I'll be using on business trips. I've installed this game off of the same CD probably over 30 times on at least 10 different PCs over the last 8-9 years.

Just the thought of having only 5 installs makes me really angry.

But call them "rentals" and price accordingly? I might be more tolerant of that.

It seems more honest.

I would rather they just not restrict the installs. It is stupid. Just put in a clause where they can ban for abuse and then define abuse as X number of installs over a period of X weeks. Say 5 installs per month or something. I could live with that.

The idea of not being able to install a game I paid full price for again some time down the road because the publisher is short sighted and greedy... that doesn't sit well with me.

If they called it a rental and priced it at 20 or 30 dollars, I'd be fine with it I suppose, but I would much rather they do away with this idiotic concept alltogether, it does nothing to stop piracy and hampers legitimate users rather notably.

That's what cracks are for, silly. Thank god for the pirates.

I doubt the publishers don't know that. After all, an .exe with the 3 install limit is just as easy to crack as one without. They're probably intentionally limiting paid users' copies, so you'd have to buy a new one when the install limit runs out.