With each year that passes, it feels like the appeal of online subscription services fades just a little bit more. Regardless of the service and even the medium, everything about it just seems to get worse and worse. Not only have these services gotten progressively more expensive, but they’ve all also started making ads a regular part of the experience. 

With movies/TV, it’s as if cable is back and is more expensive than ever. With games, well, they’ve gone ahead and dropped all pretense of ownership, whether you’re using a subscription service or not. All this has gotten me wondering about whether we actually lost something by letting physical media fade and allowing the old rental model to die.

Now before I get accused of having rose-colored glasses glued onto my face, let me just say that the old rental stores died for a reason. They were a lot of fun in the beginning too, but they eventually pushed so hard and became so hated that something like Netflix was inevitable. People hated the skyhigh late fees, miniscule rental periods and the price hikes that rental stores foisted upon them, and I myself was among the many saying “serves them right!” when the business model eventually went extinct.

All that said, I’m not sure that the various streaming services are all that better these days. Sure, there’s no late fees, but there are price hikes and ads. You also can’t get everything you want with just one service, making it a much more expensive expenditure than just renting a movie or two every weekend. Like, you’re looking at $30 or so for the base version of a couple of streaming services, more if you want the “premium” ad-free versions. Renting movies might have become pricey, but still usually added up to less than that in a month.

There’s also the issue of all these services offering less and less in terms of original programming and features. Every one and a while, netflix or amazon will have a good special or even a show, but such content is getting fewer and farther between. Also, it used to be that netflix offered fun features like watch parties, or “play something,” but those have long been removed in favor of a bare bones offering. Then there’s amazon, I don’t think there’s anything that’s anywhere as difficult to navigate as prime video, and barely any of the stuff on there is actually part of the subscription anymore. Seriously, what the heck?

If I had the ability to trade current streaming services for the early years rental shop model, I’m not so sure that I wouldn’t opt for it. Then there’s the ever more anti-consumer situation developing in the video game business. More and more, it’s becoming clear that the games we “buy” (at least the AAA ones) aren’t really purchases in the traditional sense.

Major developers, publishers and even platform holders (*ahem* Nintendo), want their “consumers” (their term), to know that they’re not buying games anymore, but merely a license that can be revoked at any time for any reason (a power that’s being increasingly invoked btw). Your games (and game machines) aren’t yours anymore, and if you do anything with them that their makers don’t like, then they can just take their proverbial ball back from you and go home.

In the past, we could ignore this because games and digital content could always be redownloaded, and it was exceedingly rare for a company to revoke the license from a legitimate purchase. And, yeah, it was a novel idea that actually sounded like a good deal. Now though? Redownloads definitely have a shelf life and companies are not at all afraid to take back “their” property. This begs the question: “what exactly am I buying anymore?”

Be it a disc, digital download or even a full device like the Switch 2, it seems that all of it is subject to strict user agreements being allowed online connectivity lest your purchase be forcibly transformed into a whole lot of nothing. It’s as if we’re not actually buying anything at all but rather renting for a very high price and a whole lot of strings attached.

Tell me, if I don’t own my copy of a game, then why should I have to pay $50 plus instead of a more reasonable rental fee? If what I’m effectively doing is renting, then I should be paying a rental price instead of a purchase price. This whole situation stinks, and I’m thinking it’s going to take a very exceptional game from a company that actually sees its customers as people to get me to pay anything but a deep discount price for games moving forward.

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What’s your take on the current media landscape? What about renting vs streaming?

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