You might think that publishers would be gunning for the games rental business for detracting would-be new buyers, but apparantly not so. Blockbuster, who have recently ramped up their rental service for videogames, have said that they are supported by industry publishers. Apparantly publishers see quite a nice return on videogame rentals where they see next to nothing from the used game market.
“Take Q4, there must be at least 35 major games out,” said Blockbuster’s commercial director Gerry Butler. “You physically can’t buy them all. But you’d like to play them all. So we have put together a very cost-effective way for consumers to play games.”
“We have ramped up the rental side of our business and we have got an awful lot of support from publishers. Publishers like renting as it takes away from trade-ins. The problem with trade-ins is the publisher doesn’t get any money. The advantage of renting is that they get quite a lot of money.”
Of course while Blockbuster are happy to play buddy with publishers, they’ve not commented on how publishers online pass schemes, which necerssitate a new copy to access certain features, discourages rentals as much as used purchases.
Source: MCV