Evidence Builds for Digital Rentals on PSPgo

Evidence is building that Sony may be considering some form of “digital rental” options for the PSPgo.

It’s tough to rent games when your console doesn’t have a hole to jam them into, but it’s looking more and more like Sony might already have that base covered. As the Retail Gamer blog noticed a few days ago, games on the PSPgo can’t be sorted into folders as they can on the PS3 but they can be sorted by expiration date. Fields for “Starts,” “Expires” and “Hours Left” are also included in the game information windows.

That on its own could mean just about anything but the idea of digital rentals actually came from none other than Sony itself, which broached the idea all the way back in May as part of an online consumer survey. The questionnaire posited a “rental download service” which would let users “download a fixed number of games during your subscription period… You will be able to change the games you have chosen for the download once your subscription term renews.” The theoretical subscription periods could run “weekly, monthly or some other time period.”

GameSpot says the menu fields are “identical to those found in PlayStation Store video content,” which is available for rental through the PlayStation Network, so it’s not as though this sort of thing is entirely unprecedented. But a transition from movie rentals to game rentals would still be a big step and a mighty big push for the PSPgo as well. Sony has kept mum thus far but with the rumor spreading, I’d expect the company to turn Kevin Butler loose on this one very soon.