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Comment by lotsofpulp | Hacker News Reader

Keep it simple and just use the word rent. No need to complicate it.

“Rent until we choose to not allow you to access it for a one time payment of $x”.

Idk, I think "rent" and "license" have different meanings. Modern definitions of "rent" include periodicity into the definition, which is at odds with the "one time until we shut off the servers" definition. I agree with the GP on the terminology for these reasons.

The whole point is to highlight, for the lay consumer, the periodicity of their purchase, regardless of the periodicity of payments. And hopefully create market pressure for sellers to sell things rather than rent them.

Fair, I can get behind that reasoning

I “rented” a movie on Apple TV last night. I’m quite confident I won’t be paying again in 30 days :)

That is good reason to not use "rent" because it is already used in industry for short fixed-term rental.

The button should say rent: 1 day or 7 days or “until we choose to no longer give you access”.

It should say "rent product and purchase accompanying one-time and recurring services".

I'm afraid that the connotations around rent (namely monthly payments) would only encourage the worst publishers to only go further.

No one is renting a game for $70/month.

Not sure of the cost of MMORPG, but at one stage they were like $12-$14, and Everquest even had a server that was lived for a couple of years, legend, where it was like $40/month, a bit pay-to-win server...I mean with a better CS support.

> but at one stage they were like $12-$14

they (the ones that are subscription) still are.

And most of them have micro-transactions on top of that as well. Some will give you a (very) limited number of micro-transaction currency-units per month.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Season_pass_(video_games)

Not yet!

Absolutely! Markets evolve, see, for example, nobody was willing to pay on things like Siri, and now millions of folks are spending 25 USD/month on Siri+.

EDIT: sorry, just came from the future.

$50 up front and $10/month...

Sellers are smarter than that, they already go as far as they think buyers will let them. It is the buyers who need elucidation.

If you solution involves getting the general population to do something or "be better" somehow, it's not a practical solution.

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