While Apple's movie rentals seems to go well, and its iTunes Store pushed Apple as second music retailer in the US, it seems there are still areas waiting to be explored by Steve Jobs' company, such as game rentals. After movie rentals and online music sales, game rentals seems a natural step to me, but is this really going to happen, or do we have just another rumor here?
For now, it's just a pantent filling from Apple, but game rentals and advanced games management may be introduced in the iTunes Store in the not-so-distant future. At this time, on iTunes, there are about 20 games available for the latest line of iPods, together with a dozen others for the older 5th generation iPod classics, but this is only a drop in an ocean, if we look ahead...
Christopher Wysocki, an Apple employee based in Los Gatos, wrote "One aspect of the invention pertains to acquiring compatible game software for a portable electronic device by way of an electronic download from a server device to a client device. Subsequently, the game software is provided from the client device to the portable electronic device".
The documentation also has information about the payment methods - "The acquisition of the game software can be through on-line purchase or rental from the server device, which can host an on-line media store. Another aspect of the invention pertains to acquiring updates to game software that has previously been acquired and provided to a portable electronic device. Game software updates for a plurality of different hardware platforms are available from a server device."
While the above isn't that hard to understand, I was simply stunned by the following part "A client device associated with the portable electronic device can interact with the server device to obtain any game software updates that correspond to the hardware platform utilized by the portable electronic device associated with the client device."
I am glad I don't have to read patent documentation all day, really! Let's hope Apple's game rentals service, when and if it's going to appear, will be as easy to use as possible...
