Lovefilm to Stop Renting Out Games?

Lovefilm may well be putting a stop to their game rental service. Gamebrit reports than an email sent out to Amazon marketing affiliates late last week asked that people stop showing advertisements that mention the game rental program. Although it may well be slowly phased out, there’s still mention of the service on the Lovefilm website and nothing seems to have been changed on that end of things.

There may well be a number of reasons to do this, probably not helped by the Xbox One originally dropping rentals. It would have given the folks at Lovefilm about 6 month’s notice, and probably less than that if Sony ended up following suit a few years down the line. It almost certainly has something to do with the transition to next generation, as there are still Vita and 3DS games not available on the service. They’ve also been upping their digital offerings in recent months, so perhaps a Netflix-style shift of focus is on its way.

It may be a while before this become official, but given that it’s pretty much the perfect gaming rental service at the minute (so long as you don’t mind what gets sent your way), quite a few people are going to be angry if and when this is implemented.

Lovefilm – UPDATE

It has been confirmed that Lovefilm will not be offering new customers the ability to rent games. Current customers should be unaffected for the time being, although they may find that new games are hard to come by. This might change in the future, so if all you use the service for is gaming, watch for that announcement.