DLsite レンタル (DLsite Rental)

» see dlsite.com/pro/rental/top as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

GEO is a Japanese rental chain, the kind with shelves of discs and a counter where somebody checks your card. In the 2010s it also owned Eisys, the company that runs DLsite, which sells Japanese PC games as downloads. On 20 April 2017 those two halves were introduced to each other, and the result was a service that let you rent a download.

The catalogue was commercial adult PC games, 44 titles from 32 brands on the day it opened. You paid a rental price instead of a purchase price, and what you got was the same file everybody else got, wrapped in Eisys' own license system called PlayDRM and playable only through a Windows client called DLsite Nest. The pitch in the marketing was the weekend: rent it Friday, finish it Sunday, do not keep it.

Three days was the online term, uniform across every title, and it never changed in two years. The company also printed download cards and put them in GEO branches, where the term was seven days for 500 yen before tax, and where some titles were available that you could not rent online at all. The first branch to stock them was the Nagoya Moriyama store on 9 May 2017. By 19 May there were 142 of them.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ three days, counted in minutes ~

The mechanics are the interesting part, because somebody clearly thought about them and then made a set of choices that look strange now. Your three days began when you first launched the game, not when you paid, and the clock ran on wall time rather than on hours played. Sleep, work, a weekend trip, all of it counted. The service measured the remaining period in minutes and showed it to you.

There was also a shelf life on the rental itself. A rule carried over from a shop counter and applied to a hard drive: if you paid and did not start within 30 days, the rental expired unused. The terms stated in writing that no refund would be issued in that case.

Renting software was never a category that existed where I grew up. A program was bought once and kept, or it arrived on a disc that had been round several houses already, and the notion that you might hand one back the way you handed back a video simply never came up. Japan had a rental industry large enough and old enough to try the idea seriously, and GEO owned enough of both sides to find out.

~ sixty seconds to save ~

When your term ran out while you were playing, the game closed itself within sixty seconds. The documentation advised saving first. Save data survived, so if you rented the same title again or bought it outright you picked up where you stopped, and there was an upgrade path priced as the full version minus what you had already paid, with a floor of 100 yen.

Rentals were second-class in every other respect. They earned no points and they were excluded from the normal rankings in favor of a separate rental chart. A rental did not entitle you to leave a review or a rating. You could not rent a second title while one was still running, either.

~ one paragraph ~

The launch got a tour. Nikkei covered it, along with INTERNET Watch and GAME Watch. Eisys put out a signed press release on 20 April 2017 and another on 19 May when the GEO rollout hit 142 stores. The company's stated reasoning was that the audience for PC games in Japan was shrinking and that renting might widen it.

The ending got none of that. On 28 June 2019 a notice appeared on the Eisys information blog saying the service had ended. It was dated that day. New rentals stopped immediately, though anything already running was honored to its term. People with rental items sitting in a cart were told to delete them. Eisys issued no press release and gave no notice period. No explanation was offered either, and I could not find a single publication that wrote about it. A thing that opened in six outlets closed in a single paragraph that nobody was asked to read.

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