I’ve signed up for three different game rental services in the past week. Only one would send me any games. That was Gamefly. Gamefly sent out games but it took on average a week or more for the game to get to my mailbox. Why? Who cares, you pay month and that means you better be playing that game for a long time or you’re spending most of your month without a game!
GottaPlay looked like it would be better, but sadly they only own 1 copy of every game and after 5 days they wouldn’t even ship me one game. There goes that 10-day free trial!
GamezNFlix also looked good but once I signed up I could only pick from a limited selection because I was “doing a trial” and they preloaded my Queue with a every version of FIFA 08 for PS2, Wii, and Xbox. Whats even worse? When I searched for a game it would ask me if I wanted to log out. With further browsing I found out their site does not work in Safari or Firefox. Forget that!
If you have a game rental service you think I should check out please post it in the comments, otherwise I don’t think we can give these companies enough hell for being awful.
Gamefly’s the best one out there. Are you aware of the fast return thing with the post office they do? In a nutshell the post office scans your game (providing the post office receiving it offers the service, not all do) and Gamefly gets notified and then ships the next game(s) in your queue. They don’t have to physically receive the game if they get the postal notification it’s been put in the mail back to them. It’s a great service if your post office offers it so it’s worth looking into.
In my experience I’ve only seen Gamefly shipping speeds improve. I’m on the east coast and it used to take five or six days to get games from the California distribution center but now that they’ve opened up a new one in PA to service the east I rarely experience more than a three day turn around.
What sucks is with all the new game releases and the holidays coming up gaming is getting to the point where it’s oost prohibitive so Gamefly is a financial godsend if you wanna stay on top of everything and not burn through your cash.
I do the two game/mo. plan and when I do the math on games played and money spent the membership has essentially paid for itself. Case and point. In five months time I’ve spent roughly $100 on my GF membership and played about 12 games. That’s factoring in a few I sent back almost immediately. I couldn’t buy two new games for $100.
Overall it just makes financial sense even if it takes a few days to get a game in the mail.
I’ve seen nothing about the return-notification.
It does make financially sense which is why I got interested in game rentals. 60$ for a game is lame, 15$ a month for a game that’s not shipping to you for the next 3 months is lame too.
I am currently back with Gamefly and in talks with the people over at GottaPlay.
Yeah, I just sent back something to GameFly and that Gamefly gets notified on letter-in-the-mailbox thing is not true.
Hi again.
The fast return service is most definitely true. I’m not sure who you talked to but if it was your garden variety postal worker that might explain it. Not to bag on our fine postal delivery folks but it’s possible that the post office that services your area may not offer the service. From what I understand not all of them do though it sounds like more are getting on board.
Here’s what the gamefly site has to say about it.
http://gamefly.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/gamefly.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=107&p_created=1120064400&p_sid=_66XyZRi&p_accessibility=0&p_lva=&p_sp=cF9zcmNoPTEmcF9zb3J0X2J5PSZwX2dyaWRzb3J0PSZwX3Jvd19jbnQ9MzgmcF9wcm9kcz0mcF9jYXRzPTAmcF9wdj0mcF9jdj0mcF9wYWdlPTEmcF9zZWFyY2hfdGV4dD1mYXN0IHJldHVybg**&p_li=&p_topview=1