Earlier this year I wrote about how much money my video game habit has been costing me, and how I hoped to be more judicious in my purchasing habits. My goal was to better evaluate potential purchases and determine their worth based on how much entertainment they’d provide. Forza Motorsport 3, for example, is a game where I’m very close to (if not past) the $1/hour mark. On the other end of the spectrum, Modern Warfare 2, while a lot of fun, would’ve cost me somewhere around $6/hour if I had bought it versus renting.
It’s the games in the middle that get you. I knew I could hammer through MW2 well within the 72 hours that it was in my possession, but that’s not always the case. I had been toying with the idea of a GameFly subscription (like Netflix, but for video games), but never made the leap until a recent promotion came along.
The Honeymoon
My initial experience was extremely positive. The first game in my “Q” (ugh) was Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. The game shipped on Monday and I had it on Thursday, just in time for a relatively uncluttered weekend. I plowed through it and had it back in the mail early the following Monday.
The Marriage
Then I waited. GameFly claims that they work with the postal service to scan games as soon as they’re put in the mail. When a game gets scanned, GameFly treats it as a return, and immediately prepares your next game. However, I didn’t experience this. Uncharted didn’t process as a return until Thursday.
In the meantime, I eagerly awaited my opportunity to play The Saboteur. Unfortunately, being a brand-new game, it must have been in short supply, as they skipped it and moved on to the next game on my list: Prototype. When I read the shipping confirmation email, my heart sank.
Which is odd. I was really excited for Prototype when it first came out, and then I gradually lost interest in it as time wore on. By the time it reached my door (this past Monday), I had little interest in actually playing it (admittedly, this is all my own fault) but I persevered.
The Divorce
Whether the game itself is good or not is irrelevant here. But in playing it I’m finding the achilles heel of GameFly membership: you feel forced to play whatever game is in front of you at the expense of doing anything else you may have preferred to do; only by moving through games and returning them as quickly as possible are you getting the most value out of the membership. Even then, you’re handicapped by the shipping speed.
Netflix somehow manages to avoid these issues, at least in my mind, for two reasons:
- The time spent “experiencing” a movie is not the unknown that it would be with a game.
- Netflix’s digital distribution methods offer instant gratification.
it would be interesting to see GameFly (or a similar service) explore methods of digital distribution, but I don’t know how it would work. In the meantime, this trial membership has been effective in determining that GameFly just isn’t my thing.