gamefly: it's no netflix

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The sad state of game availability on gamefly

I bought a wii a few months ago. Keeping in mind that most games are duds, and because I've enjoyed video rentals through netflix, I decided to sign up for gamefly since it sounded like "netflix for video games".

Well, the reality is that gamefly is no netflix. Let me list some of the shortcomings:

They display ads. Flash ads. On almost every page. Even to signed-in, paying users. Of course, I've blocked these with adblock+ for firefox, but I'm constantly reminded of it by a rectangular cutout on many game pages where some content could be.

The shipping is slow. Gamefly seems to think I should be impressed that they have a shipping center on east cost. Unfortunately, in contrast to netflix I experience a turnaround of 4 days if I'm lucky and get the returned game scanned ("FastReturn"), and a week if I'm not lucky.

The availibility is simply bad. Half or fewer of the games are available "now", and if I stick it out until I finally get the game and discover I like it, I probably won't be able to buy it from gamefly. That's just as well, since I'm more likely to buy a used game locally

The user interface is vastly inferior to netflix. For instance, on a page of movie listings, Netflix shows me a predicted rating and whether it's in the queue. Gamefly doesn't show a rating, and has a "RENT IT" icon below every game regardless of whether it's in my queue or not. There's no "mouse over" for extended information about a title, either.

Fear of being charged for games if the post office makes a mistake. While I haven't had trouble with this (yet!) I saw in their Help that if I report a damaged game, and gamefly doesn't receive the return within 7 days, I will be charged a "replacement fee".

Stop displaying titles for consoles I don't own! When I reach the gamefly front page after signing in, I'm still shown a bunch of blurbs for titles on consoles I don't own.

It's much more expensive than Netflix. I'm paying $25 a month for two titles at a time from gamefly, as opposed to just $15 for two titles from netflix. I'd expect any given disc to be shipped enough times in its life that the original cost of the disc isn't the governing factor, and I'm certainly having many fewer discs shipped per month by gamefly than by netflix. So why is it costing me nearly twice as much?

For now I'm still a gamefly subscriber, but that's more due inertia than any level of excitement about the service.

Entry first conceived on 26 July 2007, 16:23 UTC, last modified on 19 March 2009, 16:51 UTC