Gamefly - does it get better?

[trancejeremy]

No, the game I bought just disappeared from my queue. At one time, I had 3 games listed in my queue - the one I had mailed back - it stayed in the list but had "Fast Return" next to it; the game they sent because of fast return, and the game I was going to buy. When I bought the game, it disappeared from the queue, leaving with only 2 games in my queue, the one I had returned via fast return and its replacement.

So really that was my confusion - do you only get 1 "fast return" and it doesn't count as completely cleared until it arrives back at the wearhouse? I guess that's the case, since 4 days later, the fast return oned arrived, and they sent me another game.

 

[Felon]

Heh. I started a similar thread around May:
http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=197810&highlight=gamefly

Amazingly enough, everybody else in the thread was pretty quick to support GF.

The chief problem with these guys is that they seem terrified of the possibility of overstocking, so they understock instead. Availability for new titles is lousy, and even older titles with remnants of popularity (KotOR, Fable, GTA:SA) can be pretty abysmal.

 

[azhrei_fje]

It sounds like I don't play games as much as the rest of you here. But I travel on business a lot, so I will grab a game before getting on a plane and play it for a week or two. Sometimes hold onto it a little longer.

My wife wanted a DVD rental plan, but we chose Blockbuster instead of Netflix, primarily for two reasons: the BB web site is much better in terms of organization and searching, and BB provides their customers with one free game rental per month (but the game must be picked up at a store and returned to the same store).

The game rentals are one week, but you can keep it for two without penalty. If you keep it longer, they bill you the sale price of the game! However, if you take it back before the expiration period is up (30 days past the original one-week return date, so another 3 weeks) they reverse the charge and you simply pay a restocking fee of $1.25.

Sooooo... I will often wait until 2 weeks before a coupon comes out and then rent a game with the current month's coupon. I play it for two weeks and if I don't like it, it gets returned. If I do like it and I want to finish it, I print the new coupon and take that to the store and renew the rental for another two weeks. If I still haven't finished the game, I'll just pay the $1.25 restocking fee. So far I've paid that fee once (and I'll pay it again for the game I have now, Field Commander).

 

[trancejeremy]

That's funny, I used to subscribe to BBOnline but quite because their website was so horrible. You couldn't even search by director. Maybe they fixed it, it's been a year (I quit right after their re-design).

Also, they would change their rental policy on games like every other month. Sometimes you could rent games with the free coupons, sometimes you couldn't. I stopped doing that though after I got charged for a movie I actually returned.

 

[azhrei_fje]

Hmm. No problems so far. Been a subscriber since Dec 06 (bought an HDTV just after Christmas but signed up with BB in late Nov).

As a test I just typed "michael moore" into the search box and got 3 pages worth of hits, although some of them he's acting in and not directing. The top of the search list has an "Actors/Directors" link, but Konqueror isn't doing anything when I click it, so it's probably a javascript function that checks for a browser name instead of a capability (ugh)...