With the increasing price of gaming memory and silicon in general, it was only a matter of time before we saw gaming laptop manufacturers lean into hardware rentals as a business model, for better or worse. HP seems to be leading the pack with a newly announced hardware subscription service, called the Omen Gaming Subscription, that offers gamers rentals of HP Omen gaming laptops and even gaming accessories, like monitors, headphones, microphones, USB hubs, and HyperX gaming mice. The subscription is charged monthly, but HP locks you into a 12-month minimum contract term, with cancellation fees between $549.99 and $1,429.99 after two months of use with a device return. If you want to keep the device, you’ll need to pay a flat rate of $1,199 for the Victus 15 and $3,299 for the Omen Max 16, seemingly regardless of how long you’ve been subscribed to the service.
The subscription starts at $49.99 with the “Everyday Gaming with Great Performance” HP Victus 15 with an AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS, 16 GB of DDR5-5600, and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4050 Laptop GPU; the $79.99 “Immersive Gaming Experiences” plan gets you an Omen 17 laptop with a Ryzen AI 7 350, RTX 5060 8 GB Laptop GPU, 32 GB of DDR5-5600 memory, and 1 TB of PCIe storage; and the $129.99 “High-End Gaming with no Compromises” plan comes with an Omen Max 16 with an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX CPU, NVIDIA RTX 5080 16 GB Laptop GPU, 32 GB of DDR5-5600, and 1 TB of PCIe storage. Subscription requires a soft credit check, and the service renews annually, with new hardware available with each renewal. HP also offers a 30-day trial and an ongoing warranty, all of which is very reminiscent of HP’s infamous All-In printer subscription, which starts at $7.99 per month for 20 pages of printing with a two-year commitment. Needless to say, the whole hardware subscription model has largely been met with criticism in online spaces like r/pcmasterrace, with some users calling it a scam and others recalling the time when NZXT was ripped to shreds online for a similar business model.
