You know what I think would be brilliant? If you could rent digital games.
Like, right now I’m watching a game being played that seems like it could be interesting, but I don’t really want to own it, I just want to play it for a little bit to see if I do want it.
The best way I could see it working is to do a Cloud Streaming kind of thing for when you rent it, and if you do like it enough to buy it, that’s when you download it to your own system, along with your save file from the server you were streaming it from.
And there could be two styles of renting: gameplay time and progress.
> Gameplay Time means that after you’ve played it a certain length of time, the system prompts you: “Would you like to keep renting for $X, buy for $Y, or stop playing?”
> Progress would be that you can play it as long as you like, but once you hit a certain point in the game, like the end of chapter 1 or something, the game gives you the same prompt as Gameplay Time.
And the amount for buying goes down by how much you’ve already paid for renting it, so, eventually, you’ve already bought the game through renting, so you can just get it without having to pay any more. Granted, profit-oriented companies probably wouldn’t go for that, because they’d be fine with people buying a game for more than the buy price, but that’s a systemic thing.