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Xbox 360 rentals outweigh Wii 2 to 1

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January 14, 2009, 5:20 PM EST

The Wii may be crushing the Xbox 360 in terms of sales (especially considering the time advantage the 360 had), but Microsoft’s console is winning in some other categories. One of those happens to be in game rentals, where the Xbox 360 apparently has twice as many games rented for it than the Wii. Basing their dataset on 2008, rental tracker Rentrak discovered numerous interesting things about game rentals, including what was most likely to be rented and what systems they were for. They found out that more than a third of all video game rentals were for the Xbox 360 at 36.8%. The Wii on the other hand was much less likely to have games rented for it, at 17.1%.

On top of that, the top five games rented in 2008 were all for the Xbox 360. GTA IV topped the list, followed by CoD 4 and Halo 3. Nintendo doesn't show up until Mario Kart appears as the number 6 contender. It's interesting to note that not a single PS3 title shows up in the top 10 most rented games of 2008. Whether this has to do with PS3 owners being more likely to buy vs. rent or simply due to lower PS3 sales isn't mentioned. Some of the late releases in 2008 still managed to show up on the list, such as Fallout 3, which didn’t hit retail shelves until the end of October.

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User Comments (3)

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captain828
on January 15, 2009
1:31 AM
someone's missing a point here: the number of X360 launched games outweigh the no of Wii launched games by more than 2:1

nitefang
on January 15, 2009
9:53 AM
Another reason why there are so many Xbox 360 rentals is because it is not hard to mod your Xbox and save full games on the hard drive. That way you can rent a game and then play it just like if you had bought it.

yukka
on January 15, 2009
2:28 PM
there are alot of xbox games you would want to rent but wouldnt want to keep and many early titles are available to rent for a week at less than 1/40 of the cost of a full price game, especially if you take on more than 1 at once.

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