online game rental

[poly4life]

There have been an explosion of online movie (and some streaming) rental sites in the last year or two. My question is about game rentals. Can anyone recommend reliable and worthy gaming rental sites, as I'm sure some of those said sites are not worth the trouble.

 

[Stinkfinger]

Depending on what type of game you are looking for and what you want to do, Try going here.

<A HREF="http://www.ilangame.com" target="_new">http://www.ilangame.com</A>

They have lots of game servers to rent with all types of game types.

My UT clan has 12 Unreal Tournament servers through them.



Confuscious say: He who go to bed with itchy ass, wake up with stinkyfinger

 

[mrface]

i think he was just asking about the games though.

"Never underestimate the predictability of Stupidity."
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[Stinkfinger]

Gotcha, missunderstood question, although info is there if needed

Confuscious say: He who go to bed with itchy ass, wake up with stinkyfinger

 

[Mr5oh]

I wonder how they would regulate this? Obivsuly you can copy movies and such when you rent them, but generally ripping a DVD is a little more work than copying a game. What stops someone from copying the game while its renting, also what about a serial number, what keeps you from re-using the serial, say while online, keeping the person currently renting from playing online?

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[sparky853]

Tehy won't be able to, thats the problem. I can remember renting computer games from a store, back when 7th Guest and Descent were just new, but thats before piracy had become such a big issue.

The only way it could ever happen is if a rental store, say Blockbuster, for example, paid Valve, for example, for 200 CD-Keys. Then, they charge you $30 or more to rent the game, and give you a piece of paper with the CD Key on it, al-la HL2 voucher from ATI, and its your CD Key to keep, you just return the game. Valve makes money, Bluckbuster makes money, and you didn't steal the game for nothing.

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[Mr5oh]

Then, they charge you $30 ....., and give you a piece of paper with the CD Key on it, ..... and its your CD Key to keep, you just return the game.

You know I think you may be on to something. I think I might be interested in games that you could just purchase a license for, if it saved money. I already keep many games on a backup drive, just so I don't have to go through the whole install process again.

I think I may have been more intrested in new games if say they were $15-20 cheaper if you only got the license.

With the popularity of broadband maybe downloading will become more popular?

I guess a 1.5-2.0 gigabyte download isn't the most convient though.

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[BigMac]

You need to have some insight as to the whole added value chain of a game in order to see whether this might work. Alas, I do not have that insight but maybe someone around here does and wants to share that?

How much of a new game (say $50) goes to the developer? How much of that goes to the publisher, and what are the packaging costs and distribution costs for a (pc) game on DVD or CD? Problem with these numbers is that they are classified as the publisher does not want you to know what profit they are making.

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[sparky853]

Well, I'm talking canadian dollars, so 30 would be about half price.


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[Mr5oh]

Problem with these numbers is that they are classified as the publisher does not want you to know what profit they are making.

Great point. Of course if you could do some sort of licensing fee, you could essentially do without the publisher. This would make things much cheaper.

I'd imagine a good chunk of the money made from games goes to publishers, probably a little more than should, but I could be wrong.


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[BigMac]

Of course if you could do some sort of licensing fee, you could essentially do without the publisher. This would make things much cheaper.

Well, a publisher is not an artifact of big business, it is a form of specialization. In principle you can do it all yourself from production to distribution. However some people/companies specialize into distributing while others specialize in developing. I expect that some publishers will specialize into online distribution (A bit weird really it's taking so long, undoubtedly problems with security are involved). Setting up and maintaining a solid infrastructure for software distribution is quite an investment so there's some rationale as to why a big chunk of the money is going to the publisher. This is also the reason why (in general) publishers are big(ger) companies that contract developers. They set up their organisation once and need to publish many games to get a decent rate of return on their investments.

Online distribution must be a lot cheaper than distributing physical copies, but how much of that will be returned to the customer and how much they will keep for themselves, is an open question. Also take into account that costs of making games have gone up exponentially (so it seems) while prices are not rising that fast. Of course principally this is resolved by selling a lot more copies but as development costs increase, publishers will need to build up buffers to compensate for the bad games they publish and will never make a profit.

Are you familiar with Steam? As far as I know, this is owned/operated by ValvE, but Vivendi is ValvE's publisher. Whether that is limited to physical copies only I don't know. I'll check again tonight, but I haven't seen anything indicating that games are sold much cheaper over Steam. However there's compensation in the form of extra benefits like automatic updating of games and preloading of games. I have a copy of HL2 on my disk at the moment (probably not complete yet as the preloading goes in stages, I've had 2 stages so far) and the moment HL2 is released I can play it, maybe they let Steam customers play the game as soon as it's gone gold. Such things are worth money as well (at least to me) so if they keep prices in line with the physical copies but offer additional benefits in return, I'm ok with that. It may help them out to avoid unwanted price competition between online and regular distribution. But paying the same amount of money for an online distribution without anything extra (only "less": no printed booklet, no CD copy for backup purposes) I would feel robbed.

Sorry for the amount of text.


BigMac

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