this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2024
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For most games, I'm fine with renting my games. If they charge a reasonable continuous rental fee and not a crazy one-off price that will make the game available for some unspecified amount of time at the publisher's discretion. For example, I could imagine paying $2 / month to play Assassin's Creed. And if it turns out to be boring I can just stop renting it.
I’m with you. It’s hip to hate on Ubisoft, but I’m of the impression that subscription based gaming has already gained traction with Game Pass. The article is spot on though when the author remarks that Ubisoft offering their library at 18$ a month is a hard bargain. Especially considering Game Pass is currently at 10$ a month... and includes Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Origins & Odyssey.
For this to work it would have to be like, hourly or minutely billing. This takes care of the multiple games issue as you’ll likely never play more than one at a time and don’t pay for the time you don’t play it that month. You can try a game for a few days or a week and stop playing and also stop paying. You can try some indie games because you’d only be spending $0.05/hr or something.
Or you just have to include a whole library of games like Game Pass or access to all of Steam or something which would allow you to hop games yet not own them.
I’d still want to be able buy games I intend on playing for years (like Skyrim or Civ or City Skylines). So maybe a “rent to own” scheme would be cool.
I wish rent-to-own was a more common model. Unfortunately the only examples I know of in real life involve customers paying several times the retail cost of the items they rent before they actually own them.
What I'd really like to see is a system that keeps rental and purchase prices roughly where they are, except that once you've paid rental fees equal to the purchase price, it counts as a purchase. That would relieve me of having to guess whether I'll be using something enough to buy it, and I doubt it would hurt seller's profits.
For digital goods you would be right about sellers profits (to a degree, discarding the minuscule amount of interest the money of your purchase could accrue), for physical the use does degrade the worth faster so the seller would loose out.
So you’ve had the game for 3 years and you’ve now payed more than the retail price. Are you going to keep paying for it, or do you expect it to be “yours”. Also, as with most things digital, let’s say you invest a hundred hours, almost get to the end and…. They decide to yank the game from their service. No ending for you. Thoughts on that? Both are very real scenarios by “renting” the game.
I think renting should be renting, and purchasing should be purchasing. I'm okay with renting and what that entails (e.g. they might remove the service in the future and I won't ever own the game). I'm also fine with buying games, and for some games that have a lot of sentimental value or replayability I do want to own them.
What I'm not okay with is the current state of affairs, where they make it seem as if you buy the game and you pay full price, but legally it's only "licensed" to you and the license can be revoked at any time. It's all the disadvantages you describe with renting, but with the price of buying. So that's what I had in mind with my comment: I'd be content instead of angry if they offered a rental service with honest terms of service and a fair price, instead of the bullshit they're pulling right now.
If there was a proper rental service I would likely rent a lot of games that I wanted to try out. Then I would go to GOG to buy DRM-free versions of the games I want to keep for a long time. Games like Civ5, RimWorld and Cyberpunk 2077. I think I wouldn't need to rent a game for three years to figure out that I want to buy it, more like a month.
I've said before that being a PS Plus subscriber has changed the types of games I play by making indie games more accessible to try, with low stakes. Prior, I usually reserved my funds for what I assumed was the biggest bang with AAA titles.
There's value there with having a library of games to just try out. That being said, the trajectory of subscription services generally and "digital ownership" (see Playstation's recent Discovery kerfuffle) is really concerning.
I think Ubisoft's mindset here is on the wrong track (surprise...). Luckily, as others have said, there's not a lot of temptation here for Ubisoft's modern library (Prince of Persia being an admitted exception).