I have never bought a game I rented mostly because I only rent games that I dont want to buy. Things that look like they might be fun but that I dont want to spend my money on. The only game it looks like Ill be buying is Call of duty 4 from gamefly but I only rented it so it would be cheaper to buy :).

Renters not buying games... there's a few possibilities:

1) The game sucked. Hard.
2) They beat it.
3) They liked it, but not enough to warrant a buy.

People I know buy games they KNOW they're going to like, and rent games they're unsure about.

@Deadeyereborn: Agreed. I don't really follow the 'try before you buy' philosophy. I buy, then I try, and if I have no intention of ever buying, I rent.

@lunarworks: Right I only but games that I know I am going to like. If I want to see what a game is like Ill play a demo. Thank you Xbox live

Buy*

The implication that renting is bad for sales is misleading. I don't see how having no rental market could benefit sales at all - not only would you be missing out on the sales of hundreds of thousands of rental copies, but the used game market would pick up the slack of the non-existent rental market.

Good research, awful conclusions.

@Deadeyereborn: I also agree, most of the time when I rent, I'm not too sure about the game. Only two or three times that I can think of have I rented a game then bought it.

Thinking about all the crap that I've bought though I think I should rent more often though...

It's true really. I love renting, but I do it knowing full well it will save me money because once the game it beaten, or I tire of it, I will never buy it. One reason 'downloaders' and 'backup' torrent and warez whores make me lol so hard when they claim "Try before I buy."

Rent & try before buying aren't the same thing hence : Demos.

Just to reiterate what Deadeyereborn said:
The flaw with this study is assuming that people might actually buy a game if they didn't rent it. In reality- most people rent games only if they don't have the money to buy a game or if they know a game isn't worth buying to begin with.
But...
If we did actually ban rentals- and if people ACTUALLY bought all the games they would have rented... then what would happen? We would see a huge spike it game trade-ins. Now we would probably have a glut of preowned games in stores (which might drive down preown prices some) and then people would be buying more preowned games than new- which puts us right beck where we started- game companies not getting $$ for everyone who's playing a copy of a game. (which is okay with me)

"More often than not consumers tell us they don't buy a rental game because it was not very good or it is too short." - Game Rentals Eating into Purchases

When you rent, your more likely to try your hand at crap titles (like Catz2 Fahey!) to take a gander to see if you like them.

Often times, you don't.

Or titles like Bioshock, FFXII or what have you, where replay value is equal to that of a single game session. One run through. Then nothing.

Why buy when you've already finished a game?

Renting may be bad for the industry due to lower profits, but for the consumer, we love it. And because money is to be me renting, it is here to stay.

Guess that is one thing PC markets will always have over Consoles, renting is not an option.

and we all wonder why game prices continue to soar...

I'm guessing the percentages for people who piratesgames to "try before they buy" are even lower.

In all my life I've only ever rented one game, and that game is Gauntlet: Dark Legacy for the GameCube. It's not a great game, but it's fun and addictive enough to play with friends. It became such a staple that my friends began renting it to play on my 'Cube. We rented it more than enough times to buy a brand new copy. One day, I found a used one at EB and decided to pick it up--and now another friend of mine has indefinitely borrowed it!
So by principle, I've never rented games again. Instead I buy games and hoard them like the preciouusssss.

@jwrose: That's not a flaw with the study. Mark (who posted this) is the one who made that assumption, and then made it sound like the study's. In fact, if you read the article: "More often than not consumers tell us they don't buy a rental game because it was not very good or it is too short."

It doesn't help that Blockbuster charges, like, $8 for a PS3 rental. That's ridiculous. If I end up liking the game, that's essentially adding nearly $10 to the price of buying it.

I don't understand this distinction between "rental" and "purchase". It's simple economics that different price points allow people to make varying investments on a product based on their desire and available information. I find it more likely that gamers rent games that they have no interest in buying. I rent games for weekends, parties with friends and the like - but never games I have an intention of purchasing.

In other words, some games get my money (through renter royalties) that would never have gotten any of my cash were a rent not available.
Economics - not kneejerkism.

As others have said, I rent stuff I'm waffling on. More often than not, the game is worth the $6-$7 rental price but not a $50-$60 price.

I think people usually rent because a couple of reasons. First, when I rented, I was young and I couldn't afford to buy games anyway, and you can see this reflected in the data. As the age of the gamer goes up, the number of games rented per year goes down, reflecting the conclusion they came to. I only rent now when I am unsure on whether or not I will like a game enough to buy it. Us gamers are often times in a circle of friends that either like or play video games as well. I will usually go over to a friend's house that has bought a game, play it, like it, then buy it. Games that I rent now are games that none of my friends have tried or bought and I'm unwilling to lay down $50-$60 before taking it on a test run.

I would have liked them to include a bit more information about the study they conducted, like how they found their research subjects, and some of the other questions in the study as well. I think this info would give us a bit more insight into the demographics of the subjects and point out some of the inconsistencies in the wording of the questions as well. It even took me a double- or triple-look to actually figure out what the questions was really asking.

Unlike films, which I can easily set aside time to watch, games require time and energy to play and suffer from diminishing returns over time (dated graphics, audio and gameplay; "I remember this ..." story and problem solving; antiquated system requirements, so forth).

Once I beat a game, I will usually never play it again. For this reason I only buy games I rent if:
a) I think one of my friends/siblings will like it, and they have not played it.

b) The game is beyond awesome and deserves my hard earned cash (Bioshock, Okami).

c) I can find it cheap.

Funds not getting back to a game's developers is bad in many ways, be it from game rentals or from pre-owned game sales. In the long run, this means less risky / innovative titles and less diversity, since developers can't afford to make games that aren't guaranteed to recover their development costs. This is how you get the sequelitis we see these days.

Maybe if game designers made an effort for a little more replay value (besides hunting down gay ass flags, Assassins Creed, I'm looking in your direction)then I might buy a game I rented and beat.

@JohnMora: For that same 8 bucks you could get a month of gamefly trust me people game fly is the only way to rent games. When I was younger I rented games all the time most of them were crap utter crap now I dont rent I either pass or demo. Or do gamefly. I dont count gamelfy as renting because I can keep a game long enough to beat it then send it back when I would normally trade in a game I bought.

Continuing what others have posted already, game rental stores to have a certain amount of "must have" titles on hand to rent or their customers will go to a another provider that has more titles available to rent. These titles still have to be bought.

The average gamer does not have the money to buy every game available so they must pick and choose what games to buy. Not having a game rental service does not mean they will buy every game available. Having a game rental service means that some games that would not have been bought by the average gamer, will have been bought to shore up video rental services.

I purchase rented games all the time, but only if I really enjoyed it and the price is low enough. Most of those games I do purchase were games I couldn't complete in a short amount of time (Viva Pinata, TH: Project 8). Sometimes though I buy them just because I can get them really cheap (to me that is $15 or less).

I think try before you buy was much more prevalent in the NES & SNES days. Many of those games had replayability to them. These days, most games are more like an interactive movie with MAYBE a multi-player deathmatch tacked on to simulate replayability. They're either too long or too complicated to make non hardcore gamers replay through them. Pac-man, SMB, Mega Man? Those games you could replay them and replay them because they were fun and you didn't dedicate a month of your life to beat them.

It could also be, at least for me, that I just don't have time for renting games like I did when I was a kid. Now I have games I want to play and those I don't. If I want to play them I'll buy them otherwise I don't even bother giving them a chance except for the off chance I play it at a friend's place.

hence, why the whole Blockbuster/Blu-Ray deal was insignificant

i buy all my games and movies. You wouldnt borrow someon's sex toy would you? WOULD YOU!?!?!?

@jwrose:

This is why we need to go to completely digital downloads. So the developers can not get screwed from rentals or used copy purchases.

Okay, sorry, I couldn't even write that with a striaght face.

They're missing the obvious alternative choice:

Renters pirate the game instead.

The thing is, Publishers and Game Studios that stick it to rental services like Blockbuster and Gamefly because they see the "Rental as a lost purchase Opportunity" fail to realize the customer wouldn't bought the game to begin with. Personally, I never rent a game I plan on buying from the start.

Also, 99% of the time I really enjoy a rental I wait till I find it used @ Gamestop 6 months later to buy for my collection.

One factor to the rentals, which happens all the time for me. Would be a LAN party with 360's and we don't have enough copies of Halo or Rainbow 6, so we go out and rent them for the weekend.

ill stop renting when they stop charging $60 a game.

People still rent games?

Great...now no one will make demos. I'm totally for try before you buy. It works...I bought uncharted and ninja gaiden because the demo was great.

Also, I've even rented a game and thought $8 was to much to pay for the game (Read: Lair)

I do buy games I rent that have replay value. Most games don't. Renting is a screening process for me. Very few games pass.

I find it sad that more people don't rent games. It's a bargain: you get to play through hot game X, and you pay a small fraction of what you would normally. Especially if you live where I do. At my local rental place, after about a month of a game being out, the price drops down to $1.87 for one week and $0.47 a day for late fees. Obviously not all games are like this, notably Guitar Hero 2 is still a 2-day rental. That gives me a week to play a game for $2. How could you pass up a deal like that?

@Jordan Lund:
Uh.... if you were going to pirate a game, wouldn't you do it before you spent some money on it?

um, isn't it pretty phenomenal that 50% of renters tried a game, and then bought at least one. glass half empty syndrome is at work here.

Games come out and I automatically know they are rents/buys/ignores. I will not buy SP-only games unless they are the biggies that will last me at least 30 hours, if not way more. I rented Bioshock, and I bought Mass Effect and Oblivion. I will buy shooters, only if I know that I will be playing the multiplayer well into the future. (Buy Halo 3/COD4, rent Earth Defense Force).

For $300 (5 games full price) I rented three at a time for a year from Gamefly and played about 20-30 games this year. I still bought Halo, Mass Effect, COD 4, Orange Box and one or two others, but none were my rentals.

I'm only going to pay for quality AND quantity. I'd rather buy 6 XBLA games than one half-assed retail game at full price.

@Ishmae1:

Funds not getting back to a game's developers is bad...In the long run, this means less risky / innovative titles and less diversity...

Sounds logical, yet some of the most well know, best selling games are those that step outside of the box. I don't think you can conclude creativity springs from profit.

I disagree that studios will take more risks if they're rolling in cash. They'll keep the cash and continue doing what it was that made them the cash in the first place.

Innovation comes from not being able to pay your bills. That's when people think outside the box.

I read reviews to buy...I rent from Gamefly to buy because the used prices on GF are way cheaper than retail, and their games are in pretty good condition.

I personally think the developer/publisher should get a piece of whatever the rental price is. Yup. Maybe they should sue.

Eh, I don't buy it, at least not entirely. I'll admit a lot of renters don't buy many games, that being said that, a lot of renters are, well, children and teens, and don't have the income necessary to both buy and rent games.

If you polled only renters that are twenty one or over, I bet the buy ratio would be somewhat higher. Maybe not a TON higher, but still. I mean, I rented a ton of games as a teen, and bought quite a few of them, when I had the money to do so.

Course, then again, even as a teen I was a bit of an gaming oddity. Went out of my way to find places to rent out Saturn games, and the place I found was willing to sell their games cheap if they weren't terribly new.

Err, I believe "demo" distribuition will cut the need to "try before you buy".. but if I believe a game is not good enough to pay 60$ on it, I rent it. If there was no way to rent it, I wouldn't buy it, period.

So, while the renting stores don't "help" the industry, they don't hurt it either. Let the boys keep their jobs ok?

Getting a piece of rental makes some sense. Is that the case for movies?

Syndication will save gaming, I think. Gametap is a good start. The various XBL, PSN, whatever the Wii's thing is called services are kind of half-assed implementations. A subscription that doles out the massive piles of cash being collected based on statistics of play is better than forcing someone to buy 4 games for 20 bucks that they can't be concurrently involved in.

@ethic:
You know that rental companies have to BUY all the copies right?

developer/publisher aren't complaining that they're not making money, they're just complaining that they're not making ALL the money.

if the game is bad, you'll never buy it after renting it.
If it's good, at least you'll tell your friends, or someone on the internet. if you don't buy yourself.

Maybe these studies should focus on the sales the renters are giving titles compared to what the consumer would actually purchase without access to a rental service.

@Huginn: Renting is an option on PCs. Isn't that essentially what services like Gametap do? I personally love subscription-based services, especially for things like music.

As a side note, I have personally bought a game from a developer I like even if the game wasn't that great. Oddworld Stranger's Wrath for example wasn't my favori