Here's another reason gamers never have to leave their computers: For the first time, retailers have begun to rent streaming versions of PC games online.
Through websites set up by game store chains Electronics Boutique and Microplay, players with a broadband connection can pay $4.95 for 72 hours of games like the bloody Unreal Tournament, the anime-inspired Oni, and the Caribbean dictator simulation Tropico. The rental fee is then credited toward the purchase of the boxed version of the game -- around $40 or $50 -- at the company's online or offline store.
The rental move is part of a broader effort by gaming companies to coax consumers into online paying subscriptions that will complement their real-world products. Other content providers have tried to do the same, with limited success.
But unlike movies or music or news, computer games are already intimately linked with the Internet experience. Nearly every PC game on the market now has an online component, often one that greatly expands the playability of the game by offering Internet-mediated contests of skill between players.
"People have paid more for games than for any other electronically distributed content except porn," notes Jupiter Media Metrix analyst Billy Pidgeon.
Jupiter is estimating $120 million in gaming subscriptions this year, climbing to over $1.1 billion by 2005.
And hard-core gamers have long been accustomed to downloading preview versions of new titles before they buy them in the store.
"Game demos these days are starting to average 100 megabytes, and are usually very limited. Why not pay $5 and (rent) the full thing for 3 days?" gamer Chai Lim wrote in an e-mail.
The two most notable gaming subscription successes are the endlessly addictive, massively multiplayer adventures EverQuest and Ultima Online, which have each hooked hundreds of thousands into paying $10 per month to continue their Internet-based monster-slaying missions.
Other efforts are underway to build on these hits. Arush Entertainment is selling its dinosaur-hunting game, Primal Prey, as a series of four "webisodes," each for under $5. RealNetwork's RealArcade service is offering downloadable demos and complete versions of slightly older games like Half Life: Team Fortress for $15 to $20 each.
Gamers already spend $880 million per year renting Playstation2 and other console games, according to the Interactive Digital Software Association.
But a rental market's never really developed for PC games, Jupiter's Pidgeon said, because the installation and service issues are so much more complex on a home computer. Unlike PlayStation titles, PC games can have vastly different system requirements. And while PlayStation machines are all the same, every PC system is configured slightly differently.
What's more, rentals have spooked software publishers in the past because PC games are easier to pirate than their console cousins.
But games rented online should, in theory, be much more difficult to copy, because the games are essentially streamed, not downloaded. The player's computer gets the game in 4K chunks as the player navigates the game's virtual world. This information is kept "in random cache blocks which make no sense without being attached to the rental service," according to Joe Cronan, vice president of engineering at Into Networks, which is supplying the technology for the Electronics Boutique site.
And while the game is playing, a digital rights management system verifies every 30 minutes that the player is authorized to use the game.
Despite this, publishers aren't uniformly comfortable with the idea of their games being for rent.
Some companies are "having a tough time deciding which games (to rent)," said Jeremy Logan, an executive at Hip Interactive, Microplay's corporate parent. "So it's not happening as fast as we want."
