Online renting: Would you rather have game time based or real time based?

[Akytalusia]

you can mark one more for the 'anti-rent' mentality. if i'm going to pay for something, i'm gonna want to keep it, not give it back. i'm not keen on throwing money away for nothing.

 

[DoPo]

you can mark one more for the 'anti-rent' mentality. if i'm going to pay for something, i'm gonna want to keep it, not give it back. i'm not keen on throwing money away for nothing.

Truth be told, I'd rather do the same. Then again, there are some games that I just don't want to bother keeping. One thing that comes immediately to mind is Braid. It was all right for a game but now it will just rot in my Steam library after I played through it once.

Also, consider the EC episode linked above. They did mention a really awesome idea, in my opinion. It goes like this - the money you've spent renting a game, go towards buying the full thing. So if you've paid, say $20 in rents and the game costs $30 total, you can just pay the other 10 bucks and buy it.

 

[Akytalusia]

you can mark one more for the 'anti-rent' mentality. if i'm going to pay for something, i'm gonna want to keep it, not give it back. i'm not keen on throwing money away for nothing.

Truth be told, I'd rather do the same. Then again, there are some games that I just don't want to bother keeping. One thing that comes immediately to mind is Braid. It was all right for a game but now it will just rot in my Steam library after I played through it once.

Also, consider the EC episode linked above. They did mention a really awesome idea, in my opinion. It goes like this - the money you've spent renting a game, go towards buying the full thing. So if you've paid, say $20 in rents and the game costs $30 total, you can just pay the other 10 bucks and buy it.

that's... a pretty good idea. it should satisfy the customer needs on both sides. but rental distributors would never go for it. renting is too much of a cash cow to sacrifice for the greater good. as long as they have the option to milk people for free money without actually having to sell them anything, they're gonna.

 

[Spitfire]

Well, I've never rented a game online before, so I have no idea about how either of the two pricing models are implemented, but on a purely conceptual basis, I'd say that game time makes the most amount of sense, considering the nature of the medium.