Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Cancelling GameFly

I've finally finished my silent fight with the USPS. Today I mailed back my last game from GameFly. I'd been thinking about making the split for a while, but looking over my queue finally convinced me to do it. I had only one or two released games on there that I was actually excited about playing. Other than that, the rest aren't coming out until much later this year. In the past, I'd use this time when nothing good is released to catch up on great games I've missed. There, uh, don't seem to be any.

In a recent post I talked about how I've gotten several new games lately, and I've been keeping myself busy with those. I actually love being free of my self imposed "YOU HAVE TO FINISH THIS SOON AND SEND IT BACK BECAUSE EVERY DAY IT SITS HERE COSTS YOU MONEY!" b.s. I suppose the bad part of this is that I sit and stare at my shelf trying to decide what I want to play for probably too long.

So long, GameFly. Surprisingly, I had been with them longer than I've been w/ my wife!

2 comments:

Todd Davis said...

I had to get rid of GameFly a year or two ago when I realized their queuing mechanism was completely broken. Instead of sending what was at the top of my queue if it were available, it would send things at position 10 that were in low demand instead of something in the first 9 positions that were in medium to high demand. Therefore there was no way for me to add things to the bottom of my queue as an "I'll get around to that game some day" reminder - as soon as GF realized I might want some unpopular game, they made sure it left their warehouse. Bad bad bad.

I'm actually having some success with doing the used game purchase/trade-in route at GameStop - I hate that they feel compelled to either 1) suggest you pre-order games coming out 6 months from now or 2) give you a personalized review of the game you are buying in all their mouth-breathing glory but it's been an ok way of gathering new games to play.

I'm also doing an 'intra-office' trade with some other employees where we'll decide who's buying what when several good games are releasing, then trade them around.

Now if RedBox would just get around to carrying game rentals...

Dave said...

I think their queue management has gotten a little bit better, but it's still not up to par with Netflix. They actually had a stat posted on their site that 90% of the time members are shipped something in their top 5. From my experience that seems about right for the last year or so. They don't mention that, to do this, you'll sometimes have a day or two where they won't ship you anything while they wait for something to come available. And of course there's no way to configure your preference for "ship me crap right away" or "wait X number of days for something decent."

Our company has a pretty decent For Sale Board that I've been using as a game exchange. I'd like to avoid GameStop if possible but I may try that too.

Maybe I can convince some folks to do the intra-office trade thing come fall when everything releases at once.