Good luck on the licensed games rental issue . I'd anticipate it would be a licensing nightmare, myself. The short answer to [are there] "any licensing issues that weren't there when designing a GRiP3 adventure?" would appear to be "no, the licensing and copyright issues remain the same." I also spotted the ability to rent GRiP 4's building tools in your proposed licensing model. Neat! :)
I broke this out into its own thread.
Honestly I believe it's how things need to go. Someone who plans to play the game a lot would buy it, those who only play it occasionally will rent. I think overall the games would see more revenue this way than running the old fashioned way. Remember, a lot of companies have back catalogs of games that are no longer in print, nor is it really feasible to bring them back into print. Yes, they could go and develop computer games for each of them but you are talking a lot of development and financial resources in that as well. With GRiP, the cost to make those games available to the publisher is basically nothing. They already have the artwork, most of which is already usable with GRiP.
By allowing rentals, you allow a customer a very cheap way to try the game out in actual play. If they like it, they may play it occasionally via rental, or they might decided they like to play it enough to just buy a full license for unlimited play.
And yes, renting the game development tools is one of the things planned.
