What Saves More Money - Buying Or Renting Games?

I personally rent a game first and buy it only if I am definitely sure I will play it again. Renting is pricey, but worth it in the end if you only want to try out a game, specially since, even if you sell back the game, you will not get much money back. I think you save more on the long run by renting before buying.

 

Personally, I also buy games instead of renting them:

• The first reason is that there's not much renting places here.
• The second would be that I always join beta games before deciding to purchase it for real.
• And the third would be your point, the potential of reselling it once I get bored with it.

And with your brother's case, I think it's wise to just buy games if he can play for that amount of time. But for me, I always have to be in beta before purchasing the game. If it doesn't have beta or I wasn't able to get in, I would search for reviews about it. Unfortunately, reviews aren't all that reliable since the gamer isn't you and you might end up enjoying a game that he didn't like.

Another suggestion would be trying to play it if your friend has it. And if you loved it, you can just buy your own CD.

I hope this helps!

 

I think it depends a great deal on the type(s) of games your brother likes to play. If I were holding the wallet for a teenager, I would probably encourage him to rent as many games as possible, as the latest-and-greatest titles can run into some big money, especially with expansion packs.

My better half and I always buy our games. As Briannagodess mentioned, there aren't many game-rental stores -- near us, or anywhere else, for that matter; they seem to going the way of Blockbuster. (I believe GameStop is the only chain left, but I could be wrong.)

Still, I doubt we would rent games even if we had the option. We both know exactly what kinds of games we like and want (mostly opened-ended simulation, with The Sims series at the top of the list, plus a few puzzle/strategy titles for me), which game developers we like the best, and which we avoid like the plague. We also avoid completely any game with online DRM (Digital Rights Management); that is, any game we are forced to register online, and/or which forces us to connect online every time we start a gaming session. Also, neither of us cares for muliplayer online games. (Remember that paying for bandwidth, if your household has a cap, can add to the actual cost of a game.)

All of this limits our choices considerably, so we tend toward games that are not the latest or most popular titles. And this is where we save money: Because of the restrictions we've put on our own game shopping, we buy mostly used games online, or, on a rare trip to a large electronics store (such as Fry's), we raid the shelves for the few standalone games still available on CD -- which are often priced as little as five dollars.

We figure that five bucks is a small gamble on a game unfamiliar to us (and in the long run, it's probably cheaper than renting). The gamble has paid off many times; for $4.99, I discovered The Movies (a fantastic movie-studio simulation, which can be played either open-ended or with a goal in mind), which was discontinued after the developer issued just a single expansion pack. For another $4.99, we found the expansion for sale online, used but perfectly serviceable. Three years later, we're still pulling out The Movies to play for a few weeks at a time. I have the exact same story about SimCity 4, which has taken on a whole new life since we spent a few dollars on another (used) expansion pack.

Now, that's value!

But again, bear in mind that we're not kids, and we're not attracted to, say, the latest World of Warcraft release. And, again, if we had to pay for a younger player's games, we wouldn't be so quick to purchase anything outright, until we were sure the kid was going to get his money (or, rather, our money) out of it.

On the other hand, it's simple enough to resell a used game, and get a good percentage of your original cost out of it. While we have no game-rental stores near us, there is an independently-owned game and DVD retail store that does buy used games; more profitable (in my mind) is listing used games either on Amazon or eBay. (Believe me: We would have paid a lot more than $4.99 for that one expansion pack for The Movies if we had had no other choice!)

Now, if you could just convince your brother that he wants to play genuine, old-school, arcade-style games, you're home free -- almost literally -- as many are available for download at little or no cost at all. (There are also a couple of legitimate sites where you can buy old, 1990s-era PC games for just a few dollars.)

 

Renting will prove to be more expensive in the long run. I always recommend buying used games. Same way you can sell a game that you bought, you can resell used games and get back some of your money. Even if you can't sell your used game there are sites where you can swap games. So just buying one used game could allow you to get numerous games through swapping.

 

Buying games online at cheaper prices are best for us. A lot of times my husband or my daughter will simply download a game on their computers or game console which seems to be cheaper than buying it at a game store.

 

I was just talking about this very subject on this forum, but just in another thread. In my opinion, you have to play it smart if you are a gamer, because if you are not smart about how you navigate your gaming, then you can end up spending a hell of a lot of money. Money that you did not need to spend in the first place. I think that the smart thing to do is rent a game before you purchase it.

 

The retail prices of some of these new releases are absolutely ridiculous. If you go to a game rental shop and pick up a second hand copy of the newly released game, then you can complete the whole game often for half of the price. I don't know whatprices are like straight away, but if you wait a bit, it is a great way to save money when you are gaming.

 

I would buy pirated games for sure, since the cost of the original games are quite expensive. There are lots of stores in here that sell pirated games. Or I would just borrow. Now that is free.

 

Where do you buy pirated games from? Surely not in stores, or second hand/renting game stores? Most of the pirated games that I know people have, they have them simply because they downloaded the games from the internet and burned them to discs themselves. Those people don't pay anything at all, but I am sure that is illegal.

 

@DreekLass, Over here, the stores that sells pirated items are called "tiangges", and they are makeshift stores that are located in public places and even on sidewalks. But some malls also allow sellers of pirated goods to rent a space there, I have bought pirated CD's and games inside malls too. We have weak anti-piracy laws.

 

Really? I can't even imagine that being a thing over here. How strange. Were there certain laws that had to pass for that to be a thing out there where you live. And how much cheaper are the pirated games over the retailer games? Does it also depend upon how long the games has been out since its release?

 

@DreekLass, Back then it was P100 per disc, so roughly around $2.50 each. My Half Life 1 and Sims 1 copy only costed that little, but my Need For Speed Most Wanted, it consisted of 4 discs, so it's like $2.50 x 4, so it was around $10. The last time I bought a pirated disc was last year, it was Windows 7, and it costs only a little less than $2. You should see the Blue Ray movies, around 6 clear and quality burned movies for only $2.50! The newness of the game doesn't matter, the price is standard. The original games cost the same as the US price, around $50+. Pirated goods are illegal here, they actually get confiscated if there is a raid scheduled.

 

Wow, that is really cheap. So now you have given me a reason to move to your country Oh, so it depends upon how much content each game has, and how many discs it takes to pirate the whole game, and that is how the price is calculated? That makes sense. When the stores are raided and found to be selling pirate copies, are their stores shut down?

 

@DreekLass, Yes, this is one of the "perks" of living in the Philippines, lol. The single movie disks look like this, and if you scroll downwards you can see the stalls where they are being sold:

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. The 6 in 1 or more Blue Ray movies that I buy are in metal cases, not in plastic.

As for your 2nd question, the article on the link answers it partly I think. I think the store will lie low for a bit then then when new stocks arrive they will sell pirated discs again.

 

Yes, that is what our bootleg games and DVD's look like over here. They do not all have the cover art sleeves. Sometimes they just come with a simple CD sleeve, or they will come with a standard plain DVD plastic case. I have never experienced the metal cases though. I can't believe that they have stores over there where they just openly sell pirated material. The pirate material over here are done out of people's homes, using a computer, and are sold on the streets. Never an actual store. They are as cheap here as they are there though. I don't pirate movies to disk. I am not that much of a movie person.

 

Oh, God, does this technique still exist? I thought that the age of "media rentals" was gone but apparently people still support it, lol. I don't mean to say it's bad by any means. It's just that... you're kind of avoiding the inherent gamble and tension that comes with buying a game. You either like it and say that it's worth every penny or dislike it and say that it's the worst investment you've ever made. Nothing beats that.

 

@DreekLass, You mean the sellers just sell on the sidewalk, with a table holding the goods? We have those sidewalk sellers here as well. Over here they all have art cover sleeves, and all are sealed in plastic, except for the Blue Ray ones. If the pirates can openly sell on the sidewalk over there then the authorities are a bit lax with seizing the pirated goods. In the US I heard they're pretty strict when it comes to piracy.

 

I haven't owned a games console in years, but when I did I found that renting games was a better option for me as that way I didn't have expensive games laying around gathering dust because I wasn't happy playing them more than a couple of times.

Renting wasn't that expensive back when I used to do it - about $3 a day.