Monthly membership overpriced at $21.95?
Thanks
Q
It depends on where you live, and how often you play video games.
When last I subscribed, the closest hub that games were sent from was Pennsylvania. I live in northern michigan. Needless to say that two games out at a time but unlimited by the month became very limited. Also I didn’t really have a lot of time to sit down and try to cram a game so I could get the game in the mail to get the next game I wanted to try out.
This was a few years ago though. I’d be interested to hear if they’ve added more hubs to get games out and about faster to more places.
I’ve used gamerang and gamefly before - both have more than 1 distribution center, but both were still several mail days away from me. I ultimately ended up hating both for two reasons: The turnaround was absurd (at least a week from sending out a game and getting a new one), and they both had a habit of sending me not the top game in my queue (gamerang particularly would reach sometimes, sending me game 7 or 8 or something). When you combine slow turn around with a sort of random choice of game each time it just wasn’t what I wanted enough of the time to make it worth it, IMO
There was another thread about this a few months ago, and it essentially came down to the same sorts of things jacobsta811 has mentioned, to wit:
–Turnaround tends to be long. Depending on how fast you get tired of games, you may find yourself spending a lot of time with zero to one games out instead of two.
–Game selection isn’t always very good. Meaning that you’ll routinely get games from several places down your list.
If you have a LOT of games that you want to try out, and a good chunk of time in which to do it, it might work out, but most people seem to have relatively negative impressions of the service. That said, they’re still around, so someone must like them.
I’ve used gamefly off and on. I like them. I usually get the $16 a month option with 1 game.
The turnaround time doesn’t bother me. I’ve got other things to do if I’m waiting for the mailman to arrive.
The great thing about it in my mind is that for $16 I get to try out a whole bunch of games I might never have paid to buy. You can’t get demos for a lot of console games - gamefly let you demo them. Also I can try genres I which I usually ignore without making a commitment.
Like Airk put it, I have a LOT of games I want to try out and I’m not in a hurry so gamefly suits me just fine.
I’ll add my name to the list of people stating that the availability of games isn’t very good. When I was using Gamefly almost every game on my queue had some sort of wait time on it, and it was always more or less a crapshoot what game they’d actually send me when I returned a game. They did have a “fast return” service in place so that they’d ship a new game as soon as the Post Office scanned a return envelope into their system, but depending on what day I sent a game out it could still take a week for a game to get from the nearest DC (Los Angeles) to me (Olympia).
Additionally, they advertised that you could pay to keep a rented game once you had it, but a lotg of the games they had (including all the ones I was interested in buying) were marked as not for sale.
See, I never had a problem with game availability. But I’m just as happy to play game #25 on the queue as I am game #1. I’ve bought, oh, about a dozen games through them. I’ve always been happy with the service on that. YMMV, of course.
Used it for about six months, didn’t really enjoy it. Turnaround time and queue issues, as stated above, were definitely problems.
The bigger issue, though, was that it’s not a good way to experience games. You basically have to commit to a game and plow through it or send it back knowing that you probably won’t get around to it again. I like varying my play up – spending a few days with game A, a few with B, etc. I like revisiting games months or years later, and I like being able to take a break from a game for a week or three without feeling like I’m wasting my money on the subscription.
The one nice think about Gamefly was that I used it to play a solid dozen games that I’d had recommended to me but didn’t trust enough to purchase and did not, in fact, enjoy. So arguably it saved me from purchasing at least a handful of mediocre games while still giving me a chance to play them and actually understand why they don’t work for me.
To friends, I recommend subscribing for a couple months to try out things you’d never consider buying but are curious about, but don’t use it for anything you actually might purchase.
I had it years ago, back when the original XB, GC, and PS2 were the newfangled systems. At first, I got games back pretty fast (the first two they sent me only took about 2 days), but it got slower and slower and by the time I finally quit (which admittedly was a credit card issue, not an intentional thing) it was taking upwards of two weeks to get back a game after I sent one in. For a monthly service, that means about half the time I was getting nothing for my money.