Those prices quoted by the OP are for 36 month rental terms so effectively you’d be paying the full RRP of the hardware over 3 years but wouldn’t own it at the end of the rental term.
ah ok. I didn't read full terms.
It really is. The disc version is only 12 pounds/month, and to buy the console you need to pay 480, for that amount you can rent for 40 months.
direct.playstation.com
Same reason why Klarna, Afterpay, Affirm, etc exist. Same reason people rent instead of own a home. About a third of Canadians, Americans, and Europeans live paycheck to paycheck. Most of those don't have any savings.
A lot more refurbishment and cleaning for VR headset.
Xbox All Access. 24 month plan (I think). Pay a monthly fee, get Game Pass included, end of term you own the system.
According to both Totoki and AMD Sony cleared their PS5 stock during the last quarter.
This is a PS5 rental initiative. You sign a 12, 24 or 36 months lease/rent contract and pay a monthly fee for allowing you to use that console during that period, including an insurance in case it breaks and being able to return it for free during the first two weeks. Once the contract is over you return the console because you are renting it and not buying it. You can also cancel it at any time.
. They can choose to rent it out for a few months or save up their cash to buy the system at another date.
The same people who love subscriptions!
But is there really much market for short term console rentals? I don’t know. Seems doubtful.Guess they're doing this because of the impending tariffs? It's certainly one way to avoid having to raise prices at least.
Technically MS already have the All-Access program but it's nice to see an equivalent for a console people actually want to play and isn't effectively dead in the commercial market.
All the more reason the next line of Xbox devices will 99% likely be PC-hybrids: gives them an excuse to iterate on new specs & form factors every 2 or so years and making that All-Access program useful.
That's...probably exactly why they're doing it this way? The ones who just want to play a couple of games for a little while but don't have a buddy or family to borrow a system from, can rent it. If they want a system, they can buy it later on.
If they want to have a system to own long-term but are fussed their rental payment won't redeem to the eventual purchase...welp, welcome to how rentals work in almost every other industry and have done so for decades
How is that a 'lol' when practically every other company on the planet that does a rental service for their direct products operates similarly? Or are people forgetting not every corporation has a $3 trillion market cap and a floundering games hardware division they can just subsidize costs on with a rent-to-own plan knowing only a small percent of their shrinking customer base would even be interested in said plan?
The costs of operating All-Access for a product as increasingly niche as Xbox is pocket change for Microsoft, especially after buying a publisher like ABK. They leveraged their massive size (from the non-gaming divisions) to enable things like that. No other company in gaming has that type of luxury, so if they offer rentals, it's likely purely to rent. If you want ownership, save up and buy or get a better job and buy down the line.
There are plenty of people who rent their home instead of buying or paying a mortgage, lease a car rather than financing one, those who prefer to pay for gaming rental subscriptions rather than buying games to own, and so on.
You could literally just buy a PS5 with Klarna but you’d own it at the end of the term
