Come winter, Belgians will not be able to rent video games and instead buy those game titles. According to Belgian law renting games is illegal and from December 1 the law is enforced not to rent video games.

Similarly Japan has the same system the Japanese game industry blocked game rentals claiming they would hurt game sales and reduce revenue.

In the Belgium case Kotaku reports that root of the problem is that rentals not paying publishers the rental money and buying the retail copies of games and keeping all the rental profits.

In US Blockbuster must be paying part of rental profits to the game publishers. A Wii video game can be rented for $7 and popular previously viewed titles can be bought for as less as $9.99 when their original price is $24.