I signed for Netflix this week. Mainly because I realized that we have this fancy teevee and sound system that really only gets used for games. Not that there's anything wrong with that. :) My wife and I don't watch that many movies, but we always seem to have a list in the back of our minds of "oh yeah, I kinda want to see that." Now that list is in digital form.
But this has got me thinking about how a rental by mail service should be run. First off, a lot depends on that "by mail" part. I'm told we live in a city with a Netflix distribution center. Not true for GameFly. The result is that I have 2-3 day turnaround time on new movies versus about a week for games. Also GameFly doesn't ever seem to have any games ready to ship. Granted, most everything in my queue is fairly new, but come on!
Netflix also has this great thing called an Instant Queue. Basically, if the movie that's already in your queue is available to stream, it also gets added to the instant queue and is noted as such. You can watch it on your computer or via a Netflix ready device. Notice that PS3, Xbox 360, and Wii are on the top of this list? Since I already have these, it makes it a nifty way to get more out of both my Netflix subscription and the game systems.
So rather than waiting for GameFly and the cursed postal service to get me a game, why don't I have an Instant Queue? I could "check out" a copy of the fantastic Shadow Complex or Echochrome. That would save us unfortunate souls who don't live very close to a GameFly shipping center tons of time without a game.
Will digital game rentals become a reality? Apparently Sony is looking into it for PSP. And a bit of googling shows me that GameFly might be as well. I'm sure there are all sorts of problems this would create. But that's up to the game publishers and distributors to work out the details. I just want to play. Now.
Saturday, February 6, 2010
Netflix, GameFly, and digital downloads
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2 comments:
This is sort of tangential to your post but I'm curious - Dave are you still a GameFly user? They made me SO mad towards the end of last year because it became very obvious how their queue system worked. In a nutshell, it works NOTHING like NetFlix as evidenced by several times when I had 20+ games in my queue, the top 10 were medium to low availability and then some random old PSP game in position 11 that probably no one else wanted to play. And on more than one occasion it was the 11th game in my list that I would get (they seem to try to give you the stuff you want that is in low demand by the rest of their userbase). So don't EVER put anything on your GameFly queue as sort of a "I might want to play that old game someday" placeholder notion or you could very easily wind up with it. I got burned this way three times and finally decided I was done with them. Then I went the Blockbuster Video GameRush route which was more expensive but didn't have the long turnaround time. I've given up on that and am now trying the used GameStop but/trade route (I found a location where the employees aren't all annoyingly suggesting crap to me).
I still use it, but I dropped down to one game out at a time. That way I feel like there's less pressure to finish a game and get on to the next. I haven't thought about it until now, but yeah, I seem to get a Netflix movie from the top few spots in my queue almost every time. I had chalked this up to them having more copies of movies to send out than GF has games. But their queue management software is probably a lot better too. Mainly the USPS is the downfall of GF for me.
How was the GameRush thing? Is that by mail or entirely in-store? They also have a GamePass thing. So confusing.
You want to e-mail me the GameStop location that doesn't suck? :)
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