GameFly: Zero Inventory, One Low Price!

Chris Iaquinta on Sunday, January 24, 2010 10:00AM

GameFly, in terms of service, is like having a beautiful girlfriend that hates your guts. Sure it’s nice to show it off to your friends and impress your family, but chances are you’re only going to get the kind of action you’re looking for probably no more than once a month. I’ve been a GameFly subscriber for six months now and still have games in my GameQ that have been there since day one and have not been sent to me. My friends, Netflix this is not.

On the surface, GameFly seems like a pretty solid idea. The inherent problem with a mail delivery video game service though is that gamers do not treat titles the same way we treat movies. If Dark Knight arrives on Friday afternoon, we’re going to watch that masterpiece a million times and have it back in the mail by Monday morning, eager to get the next flick. Games on the other hand can take weeks and months to complete, especially if you’re a lazy-ass casual player that needed more than a month to get through Mirrors Edge.

The owners of the company have to see the problem as clearly as I do, they just don’t have enough inventory. Right now my GameQ has a number of premium titles like Assassins Creed 2, Dragon Age: Origins, Bayonetta, and Forza Motorsport 3. When’s the last time I actually received a game? Almost four weeks ago. Why? Because I am not looking to play any B-list titles at the moment. That’s like saying I would be willing to watch Ben Affleck sleep his way through the Daredevil film because quality movies like Watchmen or X2: X-Men United (Sorry X-Men: The Last Stand, but you suck) wasn’t available for over a month.

I have a number of friends with GameFly subscriptions and all of them can relate to having the same experience. It’s hard to tell if the service is getting way too many new subscribers to be able to keep up with the demand, or if they have just never been ordering enough inventory in the first place. Of course I can understand if a highly anticipated game like Mass Effect 2 isn’t available to rent during the first week, but yeah I do expect to be able to play it at least within a month, otherwise what’s the point?

The other thing that confuses me about GameFly is the way they list a games availability. Like I said before, the company hasn’t sent me a game in weeks, yet some of the titles in my GameQ are listed as “medium” availability, with others tagged as “very low” availability”. Umm, huh? If there’s medium availability, that means I should have the game. Why not just a simple Yes/No listing? Good grief, ya blockheads.

Here’s an idea, sack up and start offering game rentals the same way Netflix can bring movies straight to your Xbox. Obviously you can’t stream a game like you can stream a movie, but there has to be a way to DL the content to the hard drive and have it expire after a set amount or time, or make it so that you can’t rent another game until you delete that one from your drive. Of course there are a bunch of technical problems that would need to be resolved in order for such a process to work, but in the age of instant gratification, that’s a feature that gamers would go nuts over. The only other way for GameFly to improve the situation would be to bring back late fees, this way some goon isn’t holding on to Halo ODST for four months just because they don’t have the energy to put it back in the shipping pouch.

Are you happy with your GameFly experience? Share some of your insights below and let us all know if you’ve been able to get your hands on the games you actually want to play. As for me, hopefully the next-gen Xbox has backwards capability, because the day I buy the console will probably be the day Assassins Creed 2 comes in the mail.

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