Has anyone tried "renting" games?

[Dis]

I was just checking out the baldur's gate website at the interplay website and just noticed this. It seems new to me, but I really don't pay much attention to gaming websites... except Apolyton of course

https://rental.streamtheory.com/interplay/home

It seems kind of cool. The price seems low considering I don't play games months at a time. Although some great games I do like to keep on my hard drive and play time to time, I prefer to own those.

But I am wondering how it works. How can they possibly have the bandwith for that? They would have to load most of the game onto your hardrive I would imagine. You can't send graphics over the internet, it would take too long. The game on the hard drive would have to generate the graphics. I'd imagine they have the basic engine on the hard drive, but not enough to play the game by itself.

[Urban Ranger]

I think it's an ASP sort of things. The program runs on the server, and there is a stub at the client to receiver stuff and interact with the user.

Seems like a real bandwidth killer.

[Sarxis]

I was signed up to beta test 'Steam' which was a Counter Strike online system like that. I had troubles getting it even set-up, but that was early on in the development. But once I found out what it actually was, I decided it wasn't worth my time to bother with it.


I don't think I will be renting games online. And down with GLOBALIZATION!!

[chronocrator]

IMO those offers are too expensive. Those games that they offer for $9.99 are kinda old and shouldn't cost much more than that in a shop. And those you've bought are yours 'forever' and you can play them on different PCs even if you have no internet access or the connection is bad or the server is down or the server is too full or...

[War4ever]

er i thought dl games off the net was "renting"

[Sava]

There is a video store in the next town over from me that does rent CD-ROM games. I don't know if its legal, but it sure is cool. For 5 bucks I can burn any game I want. It's called "Sona Video" in Bolingbrook for anyone living in the Southwest Chicago suburbs.

[Grumbold]

No its not legal unless they have obtained permission to do so for every game they rent. If you bother to read through the licence/Eula that comes with a game you'll find that although the words differ from publisher to publisher doing anything except buying it and installing it once on one home computer is a violation. Even that can be dodgy

[Sarxis]

Expect the FBI to be breaking in the doors of Sona Video any minute now.