a while ago i heard about a new move that the pc game industry was supposed to be taking. however i have not heard that much about it anymore. it was on a site much like gamasutra.com anyway, pc vendors like ebgames.com were supposedly working on setting up games so that instead of buying a game, you just rent it, the necessary files for playing are temporarily placed on your harddrive, but only the largest ones, the smaller ones are accessed directly from the internet, the only files to stay on your computer indefinitely are the save game files. so you pay to rent a game for a week or so, then after the week, the files are deleted. this would be an amazing way to get rid of game piracy and games would be cheaper and more practical. i mean if you think about, say you paid 60$ for a game 2 years ago, it isnt really doing you any good now, especially if you completed it in 2 weeks, now if they charge 10$ a week for each game, you would only end up paying 20$ to play the game plus it wouldnt be worth it to pirate the game and it would be more difficult to since you wouldnt be able to steal the game from their servers because u never get the entire game, i was just thinking this was a very good idea and if anyone has heard anything about this ,Matt -= kill one your a murderer, kill thousands your a conquerer =-

I thought I read about Netflix testing out game rentals using the same model they are using for renting DVDs. If you''re not familiar w/ Netflix (www.netflix.com, they charge a flat $20 a month where you can rent as many DVDs as you want during the month (keeping up to 3 at a time). You create a prioritized queue on their web site containing your selections. When you send one back, they send you the next one through the mail. All postage is covered.

Sounded like they were going to try to do the same thing w/ games (not sure if it''s just consoles or PC too).

i think what i heard about is a bit different, because the user never gets the entire game, they only download portions of it that would make it very inefficient to use over the net, but the main point would be that this model could possibly eliminate most of the software piracy that is going on. with the company kooo mentioned, the user would still recieve the cds and be able to burn them, well i just really thought this was a good idea and i was hoping that people around had heard about it, later

,Matt

-= kill one your a murderer, kill thousands your a conquerer =-

i don''t like the idea of having to rent a game online to play it instead of buying it and having a tangible copy on my desk

besides, you''d have to download hundreds of megs of textures to play anything interesting

The two sites I can think of off the top of my heard are http://gamesondemand.yahoo.com/ and http://www.EB1.com. EB1 launched some time ago but has since gone down again, looks like they''re looking to relaunch sometime soon. Both of the services are fairly poor since the games are''nt exactly the latest and greatest, some of them can be found in bargain bins for same price these services rent them for. The other problem is that most the games require you to download 100+ megs of game data(200+ for many games), not huge if you''re on broadband but it''s still larger than most people want to bother with just to play Gunship! or The Weakest Link(300 megs).


Gregory Micek
Editor-In-Chief
DIYGames.com