I want to buy Gears of War 3. After reading some reviews and hearing a bunch of great things about it, I'd really like to support the devs behind the game. But I won't.

The games I buy

These days, I can categorize the games I buy neatly into three piles.

Games I can't rent

This one is pretty obvious since if there's a game I want to play, that isn't available for rental anywhere, I'll buy the damn thing. This consists of PC only titles, XBLA, PSN and mobile games.

Games that need support

Games that are doing something interesting that I feel need my support. Usually these are games by smaller developers or games that will probably not do gangbusters. Pretty much, games put out by people I want to continue making games such as Shadows of the Damned, 9 Hours 9 Persons 9 Doors, Child of Eden, etc.

Games with a strong focus on the single player

And here lies the seeds for the reasons I rent games. I'll buy games that have enough content to justify my hard earned cash. Titles like Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Mass Effect, eventually Skyrm and whatnot.

Turning point

I used to play an amazing amount of multiplayer. Starcraft, Counter-Strike, Halo, Call of Duty, DotA. I'd spend all my free time doing it and damned if it wasn't fun. Nowadays though, I've got way more responsibilities and things vying for my time. It's not to say that I think multiplayer gaming is any less fun because if I had the extra time, I'd totally just sit around doing it more. The problem is that as I began to have less and less free time, the opportunity cost of playing online multiplayer was too great to continue doing it.

Opportunity Cost

Opportunity cost is the cost of any activity measured in terms of the value of the best alternative that is not chosen. The best alternative in this case, when speaking on gaming, would be playing new, other games. I have friends that play MMORPGs and even back when I still had the time to play new games while also enjoying a lot of multiplayer gaming, I would ask them why continue playing the same one game and not play any of this other great stuff that was coming out? I played some WoW myself, and found it quite entertaining but made a conscious decision not to play it because of the amount of time I'd have to invest and because it'd prevent me from doing other things. It was fun, but it just wasn't fun enough to be worth my precious time. Eventually, with my gaming time becoming more and more limited, I had to make the choice. Continue playing multiplayer on a few select games, or play new single player games. I could play a little of both, and I tried that with League of Legends, but I found that unless I put in a lot of time, I wouldn't be really good at it. And winning and being good at a game is what makes it fun for me personally, so I dropped LoL and just went full hog single player experiences. (aside from co-op. I love co-op)

Why I won't buy games I want to play

I don't want to pay full price for something if I'm not going to use all of it. As much as I'd love to support the devs behind games I enjoy, I refuse to drop $60 on a game that has any emphasis on a multiplayer component that I'm not going to even touch. Recently this includes games like Resistance 3, Warhammer 40k: Space Marine, Infamous 2 and in the near future will encompass Gears of War 3, Modern Warfare 3, Battlefield 3 etc.

The solution?

Currently, the solution is renting games. Most non-rpg games can be finished in roughly 5 to 7 hours and I appreciate this because I can get a good full experience without having to invest too much of my time. Because of the short amount of time required to finish these things, I've been using gamefly and/or RedBox. I beat both Resistance 3 and Space Marine in two sittings each. It cost me around 7 bucks to do so total. On one hand, I found this to be an incredible value for me, while on the other, I wish I could have supported the devs that made the game more. I think the solution is already in place, just being worked improperly.

Online Pass

Right now, there's this thing that's been going on that keeps used games, which devs don't see a dime of (unless you begin to determine that the money from selling games is going towards buying new games), from going online. If you want to do so, you'll need to buy an online pass to unlock the multiplayer component of the game. I'm thinking, why not take this a step further? Sell your games for a cheaper price, and value price the multiplayer and single player portion of the game separately. Say for a game like Call of Duty, sell the game for $30 and a separate online pass for another $30. This'd keep down used game sales considerably and cause people like me to purchase the game when normally I wouldn't. It might hurt relations with brick and mortar stores but you could always have bundle deals where you get both portions for a slightly reduced price for sale in store.

My question to you

I dunno, I want to buy games rather than rent, but as it stands now. I refuse. Is anyone else in the same boat as me? How many of you rent games and how many buy? If you do both, what determines which way you go? If you do currently rent, what would developers/publishers have to do to get you to buy instead?