I Miss OP Video

I'm about 99 percent sure that you cannot rent a video game in Nashville, Tennessee.  Do you realize how crazy that is?  I spent most of my life renting games, not buying them.  Buying games is like buying movies or books.  Once I'm done with it, I'm done with it.  No need for it to sit around my place.  These things have very little replay value to me.  That's why I like sports games, because it's sort of different every time.  There is no story that will end (mostly).

I explained before, but I can't find the post after looking for a minute, but I explained that the closure of movie rental places makes sense because of the proliferation of On-Demand, streaming content viewing.  This makes sense.  You don't have to go to the rental place to get a movie anymore.  So you just hit go on your thing, weather it's through your cable company or through any number of other services such as Hulu, Netflix or now, Amazon.

The unintended consequence of the closure of movie rental places is the disappearance of the video game rental. Video games are pretty expensive to buy, if you didn't know.  Most PlayStation 3 games are $60.  That's steep.  Wii games are typically cheaper, but can exceed the $50 range themselves.  I'll tell you, paying $6 on a five-day rental makes a lot more sense to me.  There is less commitment there.  Sure, eventually the money adds up, but it's not all at once.   Places like Play n' Trade and GameStop offer a way, if you're savvy, I suppose, where you can trade in games for new games.  I bet if you traded in a great game, got good money for it, bought a new game, traded that one in again, got money for it, bought a new game, traded it in, and so on and so forth, it would accomplish the same thing as renting games at Blockbuster, but you have to buy the initial game, and then progressively lose money until you're out completely.  Either way, you'll lose money, whether it's to Blockbuster or GameStop.   All I'm saying is that this play and then trade business model is going to take some getting used to for me.  I don't know if I'll ever be into that.

You cannot rent a video game in Nashville anymore because the very last Blockbuster video store in town closed sometime in the recent past.  I just noticed it the other day.  I mean, it's not like I ever went into that Blockbuster anyway, but still, it was an option.  There may be other rental places in other outlying areas, but I don't think there's any left here IN town.

You can't stream a huge video game.  Not yet, at least.  Someday, sure.  But not yet.  In the mean time, we'll all have to trade in our games for new ones if we want something on the affordable side.  Yet even though I just said I don't like leaving games with no replay value around the house, there's this collector inside me that says "Don't ever let these go.  They have value that can't be measured with a dollar amount."  That's why it will take time for me to get used to the trade-in business model.  But sometimes, you just have to let it go.