Divinity II - Rentals @ D2D

I'm not sure how readers will respond to this but Direct2Drive has started offering game rentals - 5 hours for $5 and you get the $5 off if you actually buy the game. The only game of interest to us at the moment is Divinity II (the original) and it's limited to NA at the moment.
More information.

Re rentals. It's nice you get full credit. It would be nice if you could rent multiple times and get all fees applied to the purchase. I could see renting it twice and then thinking, well it's only 15 dollars more…. But, for me it's a no-go, I'm just to easily distracted to have any interest in a five hour anything. I'd launch the game then get a hair about cleaning and forget it for three hours….

Its an interesting model but doesnt really appeal to me. Basically, $5 to play a demo but with a time restriction rather than content restriction. If the game doesn't have a demo then maybe I'd be willing to consider it. Another problem for me is D2D DRM is too invasive and annoying for me to want to use it regularly and for games with mods usually D2D versions just don't work properly. Finally it sounds like they are offering the old version so if you upgrade you dont get the current version.

Renting a fullprice game for 5 hours would only interest me in the case of a game like Modern Warfare. Which would be ample time for me to play those games' single player. I don't care for multiplayer and paying 60 dollars for 5 hours is quite rediculous.

Originally Posted by Bargeral
Re rentals. It's nice you get full credit. It would be nice if you could rent multiple times and get all fees applied to the purchase. I could see renting it twice and then thinking, well it's only 15 dollars more…. But, for me it's a no-go, I'm just to easily distracted to have any interest in a five hour anything. I'd launch the game then get a hair about cleaning and forget it for three hours….

Uhm, I don't think that is how it works.

If I understand what you're saying you think you have to play 5 hours straight?

You can just go cleaning for 3 hours or even 24 hours and then finish the rest of your playtime.

It's not like a video rental which you keep for a week and you have to return even if you didn't watch it.

This is a good idea and thinking outside the box to tackle piracy. Finally there is no excuse for getting a pirate version to test the game out. Hopefully this will expand to more services and more games. I haven't bought anything from D2D as Steam is my chosen download service but I would definitely use this. It would probably save me some money as well as there are quite a few games bought on impulse that I never played more than 5 hours of although I still intend to go back to them.

This deserves applause as a good way to combat piracy without hurting the legitimate buyer.

Good idea. Test the game out for 5 bucks then decide if you want to buy it. As pox67 said, there is really no reason to pirate anymore if this model is implemented on all download services.

Pretty silly an idea. I can see it not working.

Also, what is the deal with Ego Draconis still being available for purchase everywhere? DKS replaces it, it doesn't compliment it.

Different publishers. Why would dtp relinquish future sales because Focus came long?

So crooked.

I'm curious as to how this works. Are you downloading the entire game to your hard drive?

$1 per hour is way to much. For me a major issue with games is DRM limiting my 'ownership' (possible authentication server issues, permanent connection requirements etc etc). So I have even suggested that games be effectively rented - so you don't *own* them, BUT then they should be way, way cheaper. If you want to replay it in the future, you would rent it again, but obviously the price should be lower then. However, with games like RPG's (exploratory ones at any rate) I could end up playing 60-80 hours (at $1 per hours!?) Even if they turned it into a sale when your played hours reached the sale price, that's not addressing my reason for wanting to rent in the first place (limiting DRM). If I see the word rent, I immediately expect to pay a fraction of the "owned" price - every rental type I have ever seeing obeys that simple rule. I should note that the 60-80 hours i listed above may be 30-40 for someone with a different play style. Game slike DA:O and Oblivion are points in case. Why should I have to pay more because I play slowly? I think tying the rental price to time played can't work because of things like that, unless they used the minimum play through time for, say, the main quest, which at $1 per hour might actual yield something sensible.

Well it's taking away another supposed 'excuse' for people who pirate so that's a good thing, but I don't think it'll have any real effect given most pirates just use excuses to cover greed.

Too expensive.

The future for this kind of thing is what OnLive is doing.

Paying for your demo? Last time I checked those were supposed to be free.

Originally Posted by pox67
This is a good idea and thinking outside the box to tackle piracy.

??? Paying 5 dollars to try a game that costs 20? And which, if publisher was so keen to tackle anything, should have a free demo?

Originally Posted by DArtagnan
The future for this kind of thing is what OnLive is doing.

Maybe - if in this "future" everyone has a super-connection. Even so, it`s rather a lame way to play videogames.

There`s no logical excuse for any studio not to release a demo…and the real one usually is they`re afraid people will see the game`s flaws and not buy it. Which is as it should be ;)

Similar to not giving copies to reviewers.

Interesting. I thought that PC game rentals were banned in the US with a couple pieces of legislation. The Computer Software Rental Amendments Act of 1990 amended first sale doctrine to specifically prevent PC software rentals - once you had purchased a piece of software you could sell it but not rent it.

There was another law passed by Congress in the early 90s that disallowed computer game software to be rented. It was actually Nintendo and Sony who was behind it - they wanted to prevent all video games from being rented, but the law that was passed only specified computer games. They were concerned about the rising number of video rental stores that had started renting games as well and wanted to stop it. My local video store rented Amiga and Atari ST games at the time and had to pull them from the shelf after the legislation was passed. I don't remember the title of that particular legislation.

Originally Posted by DArtagnan
Too expensive.

The future for this kind of thing is what OnLive is doing.

I have been quite impressed by few (free) OnLive gaming sessions I made, but also this disturbed me by how futuristic it feels, from the interface to the cybernetic false girl, I received a friend invite but I suspect it's just a bot.

Played from Europe it's not good enough for me, because the graphics quality isn't enough but it's close, and if they come in Europe I'll check more closely that's sure.

5$ for 5 hours seems weird, it's too much to let you attempt try many games.

But if I could have a full guaranty that game current price won't be higher, and will be adjusted if lower when I decide buy the full game, then there are games I could buy like that, games I want full, but not fully sure.

The trick from the shops is once I'll get used to it, at first it won't really make me buy more games but later on, it could make choose a shop doing it instead of one not doing it.

There`s no logical excuse for any studio not to release a demo…

Oh yes there is. The first and foremost of them is that making a demo costs a good bit more money - money that could be spent on other forms of advertising. If making a whiz-bang trailer gets more game sales in than a demo, it would be downright irresponsible of a company to make a demo until they had a few good trailers already out there.

But let's say a game is being made by a non-profit so they actually care about you making the most informed choice possible instead of them being able to feed their children. Even then, demos can be very hard - especially with RPG style games where you build up a character. How do demo that well? If you just let them play for the first five hours, they aren't going to see how most of the game really works. With Ego Draconis, for instance, they would just see the first and a little of the second rows of skills. However, if you drop them in later in the game, you get problems with spoilers and you are also asking players to instantly learn a complex system that they were supposed to learn over the course of several hours.

ArcadiA had a novel approach where you started off in the beginning but then got put into overdrive so you could see some of the higher level stuff. Neat idea but they really needed to explain what it was they were doing.

People said "meh" to digital sales just a couple years ago and now it is the norm.

This will catch on in some form or another. D2D is looking to the future.