Everyone says 90s RPGs were “dumbed down” for the West. The real reason? Video rental stores were illegal in Japan — and that changed everything.
Everyone says 90s RPGs were “dumbed down” for the West. The real reason? Video rental stores were illegal in Japan — and that changed everything.
That’s fascinating. Renting is such a toxic business model for so many reasons. Remember that predatory “rent any household object” store? Rent A Center. Glad that ended. Sad how a business model affects the creative work being sold.
In general i agree very strongly, but always gave cartridge game rentals a pass. You made me question that today.
I couldn’t afford everything that looked fun as a kid, renting gave a ‘try before you buy’ option that simply didn’t exist for consoles with physical cartridge media.
Early PCs had a lot of shareware and demo versions to fill that gap so rental wasn’t needed, it’s sad that those practices died out and left the space for people to profit by bringing barely anything more than having the wealth to buy the assets.
So the pass i gave is now revoked. Cartridge rental was me paying for something that should have been a marketing cost for the publisher.
Still think the old model of rent a movie for the weekend is okay, though I strongly object to streaming platforms renting access to nebulous catalogues). At least, it was okay when the rental cost was 10-15% of the purchase price… now i see ads for digital rental of brand new movies that are almost the same price as buying it on disc and that is just naked profiteering.
Yeah there’s a lot of games I would’ve never played when I was a kid if it wasn’t for the video store renting out games. I had a second hand Mega Drive, one controller and two or three games of my own, not bought all at once. And I can say that I got a lot more out of renting games than feeding coins into an arcade machine at least. They even had games available for swap, so I could trade something I bought and regretted, or finished and got everything out of.
I also definitely wouldn’t have watched 90% of the movies I got to watch if it wasn’t for the video store.
I think like anything else it’s neutral, or a good or bad thing depending on what kind of predator is running it. Same as second hand stores. Renting out things that people need to survive sounds fucked. But renting out Sega games and whatever fantasy / sci-fi / horror movie caught my eye made part of my childhood.
These days you can still find a ton of demos on Steam and elsewhere, I have a whole section in my library for demos in fact. Really had fun with the demo for Secret of Weepstone. I like that model over rental or “game pass” bs.
I assure you, Aaron’s is still around and preying on people. Rent-A-Center’s name just changed.
Good/bad to know
We still have a rent-a-center here.