Would a steam PC gaming rental service ever work?

[Sunburn74]

There are movie rental services like netflix and console rental services like gamefly. Would an online PC gaming rental service similar to these every work (where with a subscription you can rent one or two games of your choice)? And if so how?

 

[Aikouka]

It could work with Steam, but all the downloading could be quite excessive for people with small bandwidth caps.

 

[KaOTiK]

Onlive would work perfect for this imo. Sure you wont get to play with everything maxed out and peoples connections can vary for input lag, but overall it would work great. Virtually no tech support problems with people not being able to get a game they rent to actually run since it is streamed to them. Companies don't need to worry about people doing something to circumvent the rental period or making sure the game is not playable anymore. Steaming a game playing it will probably take less bandwidth instead of having someone downloading the entire game as well (obviously small games it wouldn't though).

I like using Onlive for demos, sure the graphics are maxed and you wouldn't be able to do mods, but overall the system works as long as you are close to one of their servers to get low input lag. They already let you play a full game for an hour long demo already as well.

I think that type of system is the best that we can realistically hope for. Files aren't being swapped around, no way to cheat it, the myriad of tech issues that a PC game can face for each individual system is a non factor.

 

[Elcs]

Has potential but people with bandwidth caps and people with slow connections would be excluded simply by the fact that they might not download the game fast enough or may not have the capacity to download it. Not to say that's an issue with your idea, it's one that some customers may face.

What would happen once the game rental period expires? I'm not familiar with the process Steam uses when a game is no longer available to be played (ie. they've removed someones access to it). Just curious as to whether anyone has a bit more insight on how this part of a theoretical Steam rental service would work.

 

[KaOTiK]

Just remembered, Direct2Drive did start a rental thing with PC games. I have no idea if they still do it or not, or how it worked for that matter. They only had a handful of titles to pick from though.

 

[PrayForDeath]

What would happen once the game rental period expires? I'm not familiar with the process Steam uses when a game is no longer available to be played (ie. they've removed someones access to it). Just curious as to whether anyone has a bit more insight on how this part of a theoretical Steam rental service would work.

It would work similarly to free-to-play weekends. They would just remove your access to the game.

 

[PrincessFrosty]

We find that gaming for LAN parties is always a pain, I've said this before but I think that the ability for one steam user to create a group of steam ID's (your friends) and then use a credit card to rent a game for X many days for that group, obviously the price would be based on the length of rental and the number of people renting.

Then the friends of the group simply get a msg on steam inviting them to participate in the group, when they accept the game downloads and installs, you could even have it download on 1 PC and then have the steam client act as a distribution node so that from that 1 PC its distributed across the network to the other clients assuming they sit on the same subnet at the time.

Once the time expires it simply drops off your list of installed games like other products on steam do.

You could have options for distributing the cost between the members as well so that each individual can have the option to accept/refuse their share.

It's an amazing deal all round, gamers get an additional value added service, developers/publishers get a rental service that they make money on where they traditionally would not, steam get their cut and sales of good games actually increase based on getting to demo the full product.

 

[Golgatha]

This could work for multiplayer centric games, but SP games can be beaten too quickly and I doubt any developer is going to let you rent them. Also, even multiplayer games are starting to come with these silly Online access codes (e.g. $10 VIP pass for Dirt 3) on consoles, and it's only a matter of time before this comes to the PC as well.

 

[Red Storm]

OnLive already does gaming rentals, but maybe not for all games (I haven't checked their market in a while).

Considering how short most games are nowadays, game devs/publishers would just lose money if people could rent for a few days at a cheaper price.