Slashdot Mirror
GameFly To Jump Into Digital Game Rentals
An anonymous reader writes "GameFly apparently wants to follow in the footsteps of Netflix, announcing plans to launch a new online client that allows users to download and install their rentals over the internet. The service won't require a separate subscription, but will be bundled alongside a standard GameFly by-mail subscription. GameFly acquired digital game retailer Direct2Drive earlier this year, so it's likely they are harnessing this technology to offer the new service."
But seriously, the reason I've not tried out Direct2Drive is I already have Steam on my machine, and I didn't see the need of both services. If GameFly offers a streaming only plan ala Netflix, I might get interested. Perhaps Valve could conjure a similar system?
The idea of digital rentals makes absolutely no sense. With physical media renting makes sense, for example, it is impossible for a single VHS tape to be in 2 VHS players at the same time. On the other hand, there is not a single copy of a digital game to "rent", but there is in fact an infinite number of copies that can be created with no loss to the original.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
copy of gametap
I always thought Steam should have a rental service. There's a bunch of games my friends and I would play at a LAN party, but never after. Certain games are fun when you can yell at your friend across the room, but without that they kinda lose their luster. You could make a list of 5 games you'd play at the LAN throughout the night, and not have to worry about excluding that one guy that didn't drop $50 on a game he'll never play again.
They dicked around and it's only
Pardon me, hedwards, but your gamefly is down.
I understand it would be necessary but unless you could play it without the 7-8 gig downloads it would just be to troublesome, especially for people with slow connections...
What happened to demos, shareware, and all that fancy stuff that made PC games popular?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but back in 1984 the Congress passed a law outlawing the rental of computer software. As far as I know, this law is still on the books. Mircosoft lead the push for the law as they felt they were losing to much money on dos based programs, but Commedore and Nitendo got an exemption for their game cartridges.
Filter error: You can type more than that for your comment.
Apart from download caps this has other things against it such as that it doesn't provide instant gratification. If I'm going to rent a game and play it only for a couple of days I'd rather spend 30 mins going to the rental shop than waiting several hours for it to download.
Steam is different, you do have to download the games but at least you can play them forever.
That'll be good for the ISP's already complaining about netflix.
All it does is make or remove exceptions, or change definitions, in copyright law.
Generally, the doctrine of first sale says once that copy is sold, the copyright holder can't tell you what to do with it. You can rent it, loan it or resell it. But they have this concept that you didn't buy that copy, you bought a license, and the license says you can't rent.
The government can go one of two ways: It can respect the intended limitations on copyright and tell the copyright holders that they don't have the power to limit rentals under First Sale, that copyright doesn't give them that power under a EULA. In this case, anybody can rent out any title under First Sale. Don't we wish Congress wasn't the slave to industry?
Or the government can say rentals aren't allowed under First Sale. In that case, people who want to rent out would need an individual deal with the copyright holder, or for that copyright holder to explicity allow rentals in the EULA. That is what the 1990 software rental act did.
Interestingly, console or handheld video games were NOT part of this exception. This is probably because at the time they were cartridge-based, and therefore not as easy to copy.