Coinciding with the Disk System's release, Nintendo installed several "Disk Writer" kiosks in various toy and electronic stores across the country. These kiosks allowed customers to bring in their disk games and have a new game rewritten onto them for a ¥500 fee; blank disks could also be purchased for ¥2000. Nintendo then decided to make an early form of online gaming; In 1987, they introduced special high-score tournaments for specific Disk System games, where players could submit their scores directly to Nintendo via "Disk Fax" machines found in retail stores. Winners would receive exclusive prizes, including Famicom-branded stationery sets and a gold-colored Punch-Out!! cartridge. Nintendo of America announced plans to release the Disk System for the Famicom's international counterpart, the Nintendo Entertainment System, and began filing patents simultaneously. However, by the time these were approved in November 1988, Nintendo cancelled their plans to release the system stateside.
This is so damn cool, why will only ever the core system stuff get a wider release while the cool stuff is hidden at home in Japan?!
I never got that double D disk drive they promised for the N64. And let me not even begin rambling on about the PlayStation stuff...
Because while cool it is quite likely it didn't seem that the sales were good enough to bother translating and patenting. Tbh American/European culture is very different so they probably didn't think it would succeed when it wasn't very successful at home.
Yeah. Being able to 'rent' games like this makes more sense if you live in a very compact house and having access to stuff that you don't need to store seems like a good deal. Having a higher population density such that each of these kiosks serves a larger number of customers makes them viable if the margins were quite thin in the first place.