Why Streaming and Subscriptions Can't Replace Renting Movies and Games

It’s easy to make fun of Blockbuster now, with the best streaming services coming pre-installed on TVs and releasing so much original content—but consumers are missing out on a lot by not having access to physical media rentals anymore. And now, with the news that Redbox is liquidating and Xbox Game Pass is raising its prices, the rental landscape seems to be getting more and more bleak. Here's why that should concern you.

Why IRL rentals are just better

The physical rentals of the '90s are far from obsolete, even as it becomes rarer to find places that do them in 2024. Especially for video games, a rental model still has a place in the modern entertainment world, with unique strengths streaming and subscriptions have yet to replicate.

Most games don't need to be owned in perpetuity

Anyone who grew up in the ‘90s knows the joy of renting a game for a weekend, trying desperately to beat it, and then getting a new game the next week. It was a great way to get a breadth of experiences on the cheap, and for some-single player games, there’s not much benefit to owning them once you’ve finished them. Even among today’s live service games and 100-hour epics, there are still plenty of shorter titles that would benefit from this kind of model, especially with Sony’s recent focus on story-based games. I really didn’t need more than a week to beat Spider-Man 2.

Sadly, rentals for games largely don’t exist anymore. You can buy and trade in with stores like GameStop, but that subjects you to fluctuating value, especially if you want to sell a recent release shortly after buying it. I'm jealous if you happen to have a local games rental shop nearby, because in general, it seems like rentals are making way for subscription models.

Xbox Game Pass is the go-to model here—it gives gamers access to hundreds of titles as long as they’re subscribed, and has been a good way to mix smaller experiences into play schedules that might otherwise be dominated by AAA titans. Industry heads have argued back and forth over whether the proposition is good for developers, but now its value to consumers is less certain as well, as Microsoft announced this week that it was hiking the prices of almost every Xbox Game Pass subscription tier.

There are competing services out there, but you’ll find similar stories for them as well. Even Gamefly, a video game rental service that ships games to your door like old-school Netflix, now requires a subscription.

So what’s the problem? If you’re renting a game every week, that should come out to about $20 per month anyway. The issue is flexibility—subscription models just don’t offer the same demand-responsive cost as a brick-and-mortar video store. For example, sometimes the game industry has content droughts. In the past, you would simply just not rent during these times. Now, you have to remember to cancel your subscription instead. 

You’re also limited by what a subscription service has to offer. While that’s true for brick-and-mortar stores, too, a healthy rental competition market means stores are incentivized to stock the latest games. Subscription services, which are often run by publishers that don’t want to cannibalize game sales, will instead usually rely on classics or lock more recent games behind more expensive tiers.

If you’re lucky enough to still have a video store near you, try seeing what they’ve got. Instead of paying $20 for a month of Game Pass to play the new Call of Duty on day one (and then remembering to cancel), you might just be able to get a week of playtime for $5 to $7 and be done with it. This is what I did all the time during college, and it’s a shame that it’s not an option where I live anymore.

Otherwise, you’re best off waiting for sales, the closest thing to that kind of deal the digital market has. The benefit here is that you get to keep the game, but events like the Steam Summer Sale only come once a year, and the most recent titles usually aren’t the ones to get the deepest discounts.

Streaming can't match the fidelity of a Blu-ray

The death of rentals hurts movies, too. Despite being the poster child for streaming, movies are arguably even better suited for physical rentals than games are. That’s because games look and play the same no matter how you got them. Streaming, on the other hand, does funky stuff to video.

The truth is that 4K over the internet and 4K on a Blu-ray aren’t the same thing. There’s more to a movie’s picture quality than resolution, and streaming services have to contend with compression restrictions that physical media doesn’t. Even with the highest tier Netflix plan running on a 4K TV backed up by a high-speed and unlimited wifi plan, Netflix can only display up to 7GB of video data per hour. Blu-Ray, meanwhile, peaks at 128mbps, or 57.6GB per hour. That means much less artifacting and much more vivid and detailed pictures.

My fiancé is a big proponent of Blu-rays, and whenever I watch a movie from his collection, I understand why. Mad Max: Fury Road looks more like the movie you remember from the theaters if you watch it on Blu-ray than if you stream it on Max.

Streaming subscriptions are a bubble waiting to burst

Right now, streaming is king, but it's not because it does everything better than the competition. It's because we haven't figured out what comes after it. There's a hole in the market left by what we lost with renting physical media, and there's only so much a fancy new original series can cover that up.

Subscriptions are getting more expensive, streaming libraries are shrinking, and there are now apps dedicated to keeping track of all the subscriptions we're forced into. Streaming is usually the best option most people have, but with Netflix alone having dropped $54 billion in 2022, it feels like a bubble is about to burst, if it hasn't already. People want options, but while we wait for someone to bring back the benefits of renting at scale, you're not totally out of luck.

You still have options for renting IRL

At the risk of sounding like a PBS show, you really should be checking your local library. These days, most libraries carry Blu-rays. PC games usually have restrictions that make them hard for libraries to carry, but more and more are even carrying console titles—and sometimes consoles themselves.

You could also try a community group. Sites like Meetup and Gamer Gatherings make it easy to find like-minded gamers nearby, where you can make friends to swap games with. It might be silly to point this out, but given Xbox's failed attempt to limit ownership with the original pitch for the Xbox One, it's important to advocate for the simple ability to swap discs with friends. Just be sure to keep buying consoles with a disc drive, even as all-digital versions offer what seem like good deals upfront.

Finally, just like board game cafes, there are video game cafes and arcade bars that offer limited-time access to certain popular games. My friends and I sometimes like to visit Waypoint Cafe in New York, which saves us the hassle of setting up a proper LAN party and also keeps us in the know about local fighting game tournaments.

These options will all vary based on where you live, but that they're around at all points to a clear need that isn't being met elsewhere. Hold onto your discs and disc drives for as long as you can—Game Pass can't replace them, and they might be better off in a friend's hands, or in some future video store's library, than collecting dust on your shelf.