Renting A PS5

Well I cannot say I saw that coming. Anyone old enough to remember when videogame shops peppered the highstreet will know what I’m talking about: renting videogames. Yes, in a time when we went to shops to buy our games – one dedicated to videogames – and got the game right then and there in the shop (none of this delivery nonsense). Sometimes you didn’t even buy a game, you rented one on the cheap to see if it was any good (or just because you couldn’t afford to buy a game at that moment). After that you’d go home and see how far you could get before you had to bring back the rental copy. Like so much else that has changed over the years, it seemed to me that the time of renting was over, at least where the videogames industry was concerned. But not so fast, Sony is bringing renting back, and their leasing whole consoles.

Called Flex, the new rental service is being offered in the United Kingdom, with offers for customers to rent the range of the PS5 platform: standard, digital-only, PS5-Pro and PSVR2. The actual service is being provided by a company called Reylo, which offers a few different contract plans that extend as long as 36 months.

If you had asked me I would have said there wasn’t any demand for a Playstation rental service, especially with the proliferation of credit systems and options for payment instalments that didn’t really exist years ago in the way they do now, but Sony and Reylo seem to think otherwise. We’ll just have to wait and see if this rental service ends up a success.

Playing videogames, writing about videogames, considering videogames—that about sums it up. Videogames are the one hobby that I’ve kept since I was only little, zapping ducks on the NES or knocking out MR. X. And when I’m not enjoying classics from the bit generation of games or checking out those earliest of polygons, I’m probably playing something from today’s age of modern gaming: if I’m not complaining about it. Something I’m doing at the moment? Playing through Final Fantasy XVI.