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GameStop Is Launching An Unlimited Used Game Rental Subscription, Says Report (polygon.com)
According to a leaked advertisement, GameStop is rolling out a used game rental subscription service. Subscribers will be able to pick any used game, play it, return it and get another as often as they like. The service will reportedly cost $60 for six months, and players get to keep the last game they borrow. Polygon reports: The advertisement was first seen at ResetEra, the new gaming forum. It appears to be from the newest issue of Game Informer (which is published by GameStop). The "Power Pass" subscription lasts six months and costs $60, according to the advertisement. Sign ups will begin on Nov. 19. The fine print says the Power Pass must be activated by Jan. 31, 2018, possibly hinting at when this service will go live. The subscription requires that the user be a PowerUp Rewards member, and the offer will be available only to the used game catalog in a store (i.e. physical discs), not from GameStop's online library. The PowerUp Rewards requirement apparently is there to help GameStop track the game currently in a user's possession.
They're the worst.
Don't forget, ResetEra is the new echo chamber that was NeoGAF, famous for banning any dissenting opinions or wrong-think. Created by it's users when NeoGAF's owner was outed for sexual harassment, the ban-happy mods quit or ate their own, and the forum shut down.
Last I heard you can't just buy off the shelf and rent out. I know you can't do that with video cassettes. Maybe they'll turn a blind eye in the hopes of getting DLC sales? But if you have to pay $60/yr + $15-$20 bucks to play online then I can't see this flying.
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GOG will sell you games outright, DRM free, no spyware, no post-sale disabling possible, which are yours forever with no phoning home or other shinanigans, and if you buy on sale they have unbelievably good prices.
As a bonus, if you make stores like that "THE place to get games", as in that's where the buyers all went, then companies will have to follow and deliver DRM free product.
Or, you can just bend over and take it from the likes of Steaming Origin etc etc and teach companies that you are OK with the ability of post-sale clawback.
This supposed to get me in the store and to buy games? GameStop is the Comcast of gaming. I'd rather give $60 to a stranger
for online play. It's how they make money off used game sales.
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I've been playing the FOB portion of Metal Gear Solid 5 recently (FOB = forward operating base = online version of your offline "Mother Base"). The whole thing is an obvious micro-transaction cash grab.
For example: If you want to develop a better online weapons and base defenses, you have to grind for days or weeks to collect resources for it, but then you have to wait 5, 10 or even 14 whole days for the "research" to complete (oh, and you can only have four online "research" slots active at once). But of course they really want you to pay, so they offer "buy it now" option that costs about $1 per real-life day of "research" that you skip. I'm sure a lot of suckers pay to speed it up, but I just wait because I'm a cheap bastard!
Another example: They also offer extremely expensive micro-transaction "insurance" to let you keep your FOB from being robbed by other online players. The "insurance" is limited to two weeks (after which you can't buy insurance again for another week). Players immediately figured out to how to exploit the insurance to exponentially duplicate the virtual soldiers that live on their bases. Because the price is so ridiculously high and the duration is limited (with forced gaps in coverage), the cynic in me thinks the whole purpose of offering "insurance" is to allow players to use "insurance fraud" to duplicate their soldiers. (Note: Having more high level soldiers lets them develop better weapons and base defenses, so using "insurance fraud" to duplicate soldiers == "pay to win".)
It's probably important to note that only players who have pay Sony $5/mo for a Playstation Plus account can use insurance fraud. PS+ users get another exclusive bonus: they can PVP (e.g. if a PS+ user invades the base of another PS+ user that's online, then the owner of the base can show up and PVP the invader.)
I don't have PS+ account, which means I can still raid the bases of players that have PS+ accounts, but I can't trigger PVP (which just makes it easier for me to steal resources and soldiers from the base, even if the other person is online waiting for PVP!). Lately I've been having fun robbing duplicated soldiers from defenseless pay-to-win players' bases.
tl;dr: Cheap bastard AC whines that people are using pay-to-win and then brags that he's stealing the pay-to-win kids' ill-gotten gains behind their backs.
If Konami cared about quality... ah, you can finish that one yourself.
Modern games already offer a subscription: From the publisher. GameStop will need to purge the linked account so it can be used again.
Then again, this might empower fanatics to avoid modern games and force publishers back to an (essentially) off-line philosophy.
Libraries tried this with books: The mediocre and good stories have high turnover, the great stories are kept in a cupboard for a few years, then returned.
I'm a bit similar: Once, I've finished a game, I never want to play it again but I can take years to finish a game.
I've subscribed to GameFly a few times, I bet they're crapping their pants about now. Let's see, I can pay $16/mo. to rent one game at a time via GameFly, or what works out to $10/mo. through Power Pass. With the former, I have to wait for the post office to deliver the game, and it's usually a surprise which of the games in my queue I end up getting; with the latter, I walk into any GameStop, find out what they have right now, and get it immediately. If I don't like the selection at one GameStop I can drive a few minutes away for a different selection. Ok, someone who doesn't have a car, or lives in a rural area that only has one GameStop nearby, may prefer the convenience of mail delivery. If there's only a couple games you'd care to rent, then that 6 months would be mostly wasted. I have a feeling that the vast majority of the most profitable customers will switch to Power Pass, I know I'm tempted.
I don't like wasting a large portion of each month (when I'm paying by the month) waiting for the mail to deliver my next game; GameFly cross-ships, but I still end up waiting 3-4 business days (in suburban Chicago; YMMV) They really ought to credit your account for days you spend waiting for shipping (they track this already.) Having two games out at a time lessens the impact of this, although that costs $23/mo. About 1/4 of the time, the disc is scratched and can't be installed/played through; wasting yet more time waiting for a replacement (worse if I'm partway through the game) adds insult to injury, and having two games out doesn't help with this. Popular games are most likely to be scratched, and are least available, so the chances you'll get a good copy are unusually bad. Being able to immediately go to a GameStop and exchange for another copy/different game would be game-changing (no pun intended.) Oh and then at the end of the 6 months, I can keep any used game I want (presumably, that they have on hand.)
I've also rented games from RedBox, but paying by the day (and the small selection) is unlikely to compete with a 6 month subscription to a much wider range of games. Staying up until 8am to beat a game because I refuse to pay for one additional day of rental (and then rushing to drop it off before work) is something I'd rather not repeat. That said, it's useful for trialing games you're unsure you'd like. Casual gamer whose friends are raving about Dark Souls 3? Rent it for a day. Renting an RPG from RedBox long enough to play through it would be insane, though.
I imagine so many GameStop customers will make use of this Power Pass that it'll be self-defeating: people will be less likely to purchase games and subsequently resell them to GameStop, leading to reduced availability of used copies, making the Power Pass less useful. One benefit of GameFly is they always buy some new copies, so you have a chance of getting a new highly-anticipated game; whereas with Power Pass you have to wait until some people resell the title (and if it's a long, excellent title like Breath of the Wild, that may be quite the wait... although in that case you should maybe just buy it new.)
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
and finish in the body. It's confusing.
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So there goes one of the few benefits employees have at GS. I guess they still get first crack at "borrowing" new games that they remove from the shelf cases "to reduce theft".