A while ago, my colleague Ben Sledge wrote abouthow he’d been regretting selling his PlayStation 5, and how he wished he could rent one, if that service was only available where he lives. I’ve been toying with the idea of renting aPS5to playSpider-Man 2myself – in fact, I was so serious about it that I nearly pulled the trigger and arranged my rental yesterday. I really liked the firstSpider-Mangame and the spin-offMiles Morales game, and I do want to play it on release.
But the rental services were very specifically for 1, 3, 6, and 12 months. I won’t be able to finish it in a month since I’m travelling, so I’ll have to settle for the three-month option, which obviously means more money out of my pocket. But then after I finish the game (realistically I’ll be done in two months, since I’ll be playing itall the time), the PS5 is just going to be sitting in my room, wasting money, because there is almost nothing I want to play on the PS5 that I can’t already play on my Xbox Series X.
Console warriors, stop typingright now. I’m not saying either is better or worse, just that the PlayStation exclusives have been mostly unappealing to me. Spider-Man 2 is the first PS5 game to get me excited, and the console has already been out for three years. Out of all the PS5 exclusives out there, I probably would have played Returnal, and I was tempted to try Final Fantasy 16 though the ensuing discourse around it did turn me off more or less entirely to the idea. But really, that’s it. There’s nothing for me to play on the PS5 that I can’t play on my rickety, rocketship-loud PS4 or my Xbox.
So why would I spend all that money? It would cost me well over $100 to rent the console for three months, and that’s not even including the cost of the game itself. I very seriously considered just buying the console when Final Fantasy 16 came out so I could sit secure in the knowledge that I have every console available and I can do my job to the best of my ability, but I don’t have that much money to waste on what will, almost definitely, become a glorified paperweight for at least part of the time I’m paying to have it take space in my house. My Xbox Series X does almost everything I want it to do, aside from running Marvel’s Spider-Man 2.
And that’s a shame. Honestly, if I could justify buying a PS5, I would already have bought it. If there were, let’s say, five PS5 exclusives I really wanted to play, renting wouldn’t even be on my mind – I’d be giving my PS4 away to make permanent room for its better, cooler, smarter older brother. But, again, we are three years into the life cycle of this console and there are few exclusives, and fewer still that I’m keen to ever play. If I can’t convince myself to even rent a PS5 for a short period because there’s so few games it’s simply not worth it, then I may never end up buying a PS5 at all.
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