Direct2Drive Now Offers Digital Rentals
PC gamers can now rent various titles from Direct2Drive.
Friday PC gaming digital distributor (and Steam rival) Direct2Drive (D2D) announced that it's now offering rentals to PC gamers, charging a mere $5 for five hours of play. If the renter likes the game and decides to purchase the full digital copy, the $5 will be knocked off the original pricetag.
"One of the many reasons I’m proud to work for D2D is the on-going commitment to better serve our customers and followers," reads the D2D blog. "Trust me if you could be a fly on the wall during our many brain-storming sessions you’ll walk away satisfied in knowing we take all your feedback to heart."
The first set of titles to fall within the new rental service is the original F.E.A.R., Divinity 2, Grid and Silent Hill: Homecoming.
The D2D rental deal is a bit pricey given other offerings by competing digital distributors. Steam doesn't offer a rental service whatsoever; rather, it will occasionally allow Steam members to play a select title for free over the weekend. OnLive offers a better, cheaper "rental" service at $5.99 for three days and $8.99 for five days.
Is $5 for five hours a bit steep? It would make sense to charge PC gamers a daily rate at the very least. Five days for $5 seems more reasonable, but then again many renters may actually complete the game in that timeframe, defeating D2D's plan to hook customers into purchasing the entire game outright.
PS: This comment system sucks...
How can TH compare prices for a real game download service with a streamed one where you don't download the whole client but rather get a(often poor quality) rendered stream on a service thats also are prone to input and/or video lag due to the nature of the Internet (and usually not an overly generous share of the server resources).
If you get the whole game your allowed to REALLY see how YOUR hardware are going to present the game and its a far more valuable.
Competitor sure , but rival no d2d does not rival steam nor can it ever give steam any real threat until it offers the same capabilities of steam , that being not only a store , but also a social network in of it's self as well as making it's self a DRM instead of offering digital games with secueom/tags ect ect. DRM (that usually goes ape shit on digital versions of games) lastly D2D jsut doens'tofer teh saving that steam does , in comparions what few sales it does have , look like a sad joke compared to steams numerous year around sales that drop prices drastically
$5 for 3 days, or maybe even 24 hour pass is more reasonable.
The key point for me is that if you then buy the game you get a $5 reduction, essentially then rather than buy games you're interested in, as is the case now, you could rent every one beforehand for $5 then only pay full price for the ones that are actually worth your cash. This could motivate developers to work harder, since they wouldn't have the same swathes of people buying bad or mediocre games on hype alone.
Those hackers already know how to hack the game for free. I don't think they'll pay 5$ to be semi-legit.
True, I wasn't thinking about that. Pretty pointless then.