Who has tried Gamefly and other video game rental sites?

Looking for some reviews from customers

Hoping to find a few customers of Gamefly and other similar places. A few that I'm aware of, but have never personally checked out are: http://www.gplay.com, http://www.redoctanerentals.com/, and of course http://www.gamefly.com/.

I know you can also sign up for unlimited rental deals at local Blockbuster stores using their Game Pass deal. I have a little experience with that deal from renting some games for my son in the past there. (Actually my wife did the renting in that case, and except for having the Game Pass automatically renew when she didn't want it to, it wasn't a bad deal if your local Blockbuster maintains a reasonable stock of the hottest games).

I've seen at least one very bad review of Gamefly online, and when searching around, found a few other people (via ePinions, I think) that were very disappointed by Gamefly. They are equated to Netflix, and sometimes called the Netflix of video gaming. You rent by mail, get the games in the mail, no late fees (as long as you maintain membership with them) and keep games out as long as you want once you have them rented. Their prices are a bit higher than I might like, but somewhat understandable if their service is good.

Video games tend to be more expensive to purchase than DVDs are, so I figure that the renter is probably entitled to charge something closer to the $25 a month mark for games. The only downside for the rental companies being that I also am well aware that I can purchase games brand new for around $40 - $50 for most Xbox or PS2 games when they first come out at Best Buy or Circuit City. If I'm looking at PSP games, then typically the prices will be even better, down around $25 - $35 during the "new" sales if you are lucky. Either way, you can then take the game you bought, eBay it or trade it at a local Gamestop, EB Games, or similar outlet (all now owned by the same group in most cases, except for the chain that is affiliated with Hollywood Video, Gamestop and EB Games are the same company, and Gamestop also had previously acquired all Funcoland's).

Trade-ins can be a big disappointment. If you are not "quick" with the games you bought on winning/beating the games, then you find that the market for trade-ins is virtually gone, and the value is non-existent. Instead of getting back roughly half what you paid for the game, you'll get 1/4 or less of the original price and be left unhappy over missing the opportunity to get most of the money back. On the other hand, if you look at that lost money as a rental fee, then you are perhaps right back where I'm at here -- wondering if it's better to rent, or better to buy.

Which brings me back to the question I ask in my headline - I'm looking for people that have tried Gamefly, Red Octane, GPlay or some of these other services, and wondering what their opinions of these places are.

If you've tried these places, did you like the service? Did you feel you got good value for your payment? Was the selection of games good or did you feel that new releases were never added that quickly? When you selected newer games were they readily available, or were you stuck waiting a long time for your popular choices?

More importantly, did you ever feel ripped off by these services? Did you get charged late fees, lost or damaged material fees, or other similar problems that should serve as warning that no one should be doing business with these companies?

I really appreciate (in advance) any information others might have on these companies. I'd like to find a company like Netflix that would have enough selection for me to keep from spending $60 per game for Xbox 360 games, but I am thinking more and more my best bet would be Blockbuster, even though my local store has a much smaller collection of games available than I would like.

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We use GameFly. It's around $22 to have two games out at a time, and we feel like that's a good value. Adrian rents and beats about 1 -2 games per week. We normally would buy maybe 1 or 2 full price games per month, so it saves us some money. And it's certainly cheaper than paying nearly $9 a week (plus late fees!) to rent games from Blockbuster.

On the surface, there's a great selection. The only problem is popular games are often listed as having a "short wait".

Another problem we've had, and it may just be because of where we live, is that there is quite a lag between when a game is returned and when the next one is received. We've had wait times of over a week. For this reason my husband is trying to find a similar service that can offer faster access to games.

Used games are sold for decent prices as well. I think we've bought one used game from Gamefly.

With the exception of the wait time, we've been happy with GF and they haven't given us any hassles. It just sucks to have games floating around in the mail while my hubby's stuck at home playing his old Dynasty Warriors 5 game...again.

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Thanks for the comments TW, again, much appreciated.

Understand on the wait times. The same thing irritates me with Netflix also. I know that Netflix absolutely does not ship or process returned discs on the weekends or holidays. That means if they would have received something you shipped back on Saturday, it will be Monday before they officially receive it, and then ship you your next choice. Those built in hold times are part of what Netflix is trying to profit on.

Netflix has also been caught (thanks to someone with a lot of time on their hands to analyze their practices) fixing their selections so that low profit customers (customers that rent a lot from them in a month without being on one of the more expensive many discs at a time out plan) will be at the bottom of the rental que, and be stuck with waits for items. I forget the exact analysis, but I had observed the same things myself (and continue to observe them). If you rent a lot, no matter how much you rush to ship things back quickly so you could get something else in the same week, the odds are stacked against you being able to get any of the more popular selections. You could get more older selections (maybe), or be stuck with lots of films in your que you'd never get.

Anyway, I understand where you are coming from on being stuck with a small selection of games. I hate buying a bunch of games when I know I'll never play them through, but I also hate not having choices. I like to have a few different games to sit and choose from when I fire up the gaming system. Not a ton, but enough that I could choose say auto racing (like PGR3 or Ridge Racer), Baseball, Football (like Madden) and perhaps Hockey or Hoops. Oh, and a good First Person Shooter (FPS) like SOCOM, Call of Duty or similar.

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Any others that have tried either of these services?

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