I would expect just the opposite. By serving a larger market, you can smooth out irregularities in demand much better. Say you have a game that, at any given point, 0.1% of the gaming population would want to be playing. If you’re a small local game rental store, you can’t really even justify getting a single copy of that game until your customer base is up around a thousand, and even then, sometimes you’ll still have two people wanting your single copy at once (leading to an unhappy customer), or nobody wanting it and it just sitting on your shelves (leading to no profit for you). But if you’ve got a customer base of 100,000 people, then you can justify getting 100 copies of that game. Maybe sometimes there’ll be demand for 110 copies of the game, or only for 90 copies, so you’ll still occasionally have customers who need to wait, or games sitting idle on your shelves, but it’s nowhere neat 100 times as much waiting customers or idle product that the small local store had. Your income grows linearly with the size of your customer base, but your inefficiency costs scale as the square root of your customer base.
BUT!.. If you create some kind of pre-order process for reserving games, you’ll know exactly which games you should order and which games you might not have to carry.
It’s an idea I’ve had knocking around in my head for a few months now and if I had the money I bet it would be very profitable in the right climate (i.e. a high concentration of heavy gamers willing to pay slightly cheaper rates for a local gamefly).
That’s fine if you’re selling the games outright, but the number of people who want the game now doesn’t necessarily tell you the number who will want it three or four rental cycles down the line.
Think of it this way: Suppose you started such a local service in Los Angeles, and someone else started one in Chicago, and someone else started one in New York, and so on. How could it hurt for all of you to get together, so you could occasionally borrow a copy of a game from the Chicago guy when your demand was higher than usual, or the New York guy did the same from you? Surely all of your local businesses would benefit from such a cooperative agreement. But that’s pretty much what the national service has already.
True… but I think you’re still missing the point I am trying to make. Let me try one last time.
I don’t know in advance if I will like a game or not. I know that I might like it, based on having read reviews, seen trailers and the like. If I want to play it and find out for sure, I have two primary options:
- Buy it
- Rent it
Buying games is a fine option, and one I choose when I have played a game and know I like it. But absent that sure knowledge, renting allows me to reduce the risk of paying $50 for a game that it turns out I don’t like.
Case in point: SSX On Tour. The rest of the series is genius - I love SSX and SSX Tricky, and SSX 3 is so good I bought it on two different platforms. But SSX On Tour is unmitigated crap, with terrible music, stupid gameplay and offensive minigames, and a terrible design aesthetic. Your mileage may vary, of course.
I bought SSX On Tour, because I “knew” I’d like it. Had I rented it first, I’d have saved myself $50.
That’s it, really. It’s not a terribly complex thing. I get that there are people who dislike GameFly for whatever reason, and they have every right to. Me, I think it’s a handy service. I’ll resubscribe when I have more time in my life to play games, and use it to test games before I buy them to make sure I don’t get another turd like SSX On Tour.
Well I went to my local video store on Saturday and picked up a copy of Call of Juarez … so Bob in Denver can just go screw for all I care.
Me - 1; Gamefly - 0.
In that case, it comes down to a numbers game: How often do you pick up new games, how often do you encounter a game you think you’ll like but don’t, etc. And of course, there’s also the question of what other ways you have available to try out a game before buying it, such as trying it out at a friend’s house for free, or renting from a conventional store. There are certainly sets of parameters which favor Gamefly, but I doubt that most folks end up falling in that category.
I use Netflix, too, and while I don’t often get movies I don’t like, it certainly happens. And I think that’s a good thing.
In fact, I would argue that I’ve enjoyed lots of movies that I otherwise would not have seen because of the lower costs of seeing the movies leads me to be more adventurous and order movies that I’m less sure about. If I had to buy each movie I watched, I would probably spend a lot less money on movies I didn’t like, but I’d also watch a lot fewer movies, and I think that my general film experience would be poorer for it. I can’t speak for others, but if I never watched a movie I didn’t like, I’d I think I ought to expand my horizons a bit.
The fact that you can pay just a little bit to experience something new, even if you don’t end up liking it, is a strong factor in favor of services like Gamefly and Netflix. Lowering the cost of failure lets you try out movies and games that you’re not sure of, and some of those are bound to be enjoyable enough to make up for the duds.
On the other hand, my local video store closes its doors in a week, so there’s that too.
Actually, GameFly is testing out the RedBox model down in Texas.
I dropped a Gamefly game in the mail today, anyone want to take bets on which game in my queue will be sent out to me?
- Prototype (Low)
- Red Faction Guerrilla (Medium)
- Ghostbusters (Low)
- Raiden Fighters Aces (High)
- MadWorld (High)
- The Conduit (Low)
- Terminator Salvation (Low)
- Resident Evil 5 (High)
- Dragon Quest V (High)
- House of the Dead Overkill (High)
Most likely you’ll get either Raiden Fighter Aces or Madworld. Your top 3 are all still too new. There’s a close to 0% chance they’ll ship those.
Maybe you could get in good with **Lapracorn **and he’ll nudge the boys in the mail room.
I kid … I kid.
You’re probably right, but I find it interesting that a few months ago, RE5 was sitting near the top of my list with High availability and it was passed over to give me something else (which I believe had Medium or High). The availability rating seems to be a complete crapshoot when it comes to Gamefly.
Looks like MadWorld it is. I hope it’s good.
I don’t mean to beat a dead horse, but I’m now convinced Gamefly doesn’t play fair with their availability/fulfillment system. I sent a game back yesterday and today I find out that I’m getting Resident Evil 5.
I want to play RE5, but right now it’s ranked #10 on my GameQ, behind three games ranked with “high” availability and one marked “Available Now” (RE5 was also marked Available Now).
Maybe it’s punishment for canceling my subscription after Christmas and reupping in June.
Similar experiences here. Essentially, I could get 2 games a month, if that. Im in Chicago and the games were not popular games. After long delays I contacted their service dept and found out that they didnt get one of my games back and then another game was lost on its way to me. On my first month I managed to get one game and played it a couple days. Unless they are able to up their game to a Netflix-type level, I dont see myself using them or recommending them again.
Really? I’ve never seen Netflix skip ahead more than one step in the queue, and that always when the skipped disc was labeled low availability.
Again, I just want Netflix to bite this bullet and buy them out.