2005-06-21: Strange news: monthly subscription-rental of games is cheaper than buying

I should first start out with what made me switch from buying to renting. First of all, I'm a cheapskate, and secondly I'm somewhat of a hoarder. I used to browse the used section at Gamestop/EB/what have you, and pick up pretty much every PS2 and Dreamcast game I was interested in, provided it was cheap. When they'd have buy 2 get 1 free sales, I was usually buying about six games. In short, I used to buy a lot of used games. So many, in fact, that I was generally spending $100-$200 per month on games. That having been said, I was coming home with huge numbers of games compared to the turkeys who always buy new games at full price. $40 games always seemed insanely expensive to me; they still do. And now, two years after I subscribed, $60 games are just ludicrous. There's no way I'd be willing to spend that much on games that I can get for $10 if I wait six months and bargain hunt. Part of what I enjoyed about buying, was the thrill of the hunt too. I had certain hunting grounds staked out which saw few used-game buyers, so the better bargains would be found there.

What ultimately defeated this, was when I moved. In September 2004, I moved into the trailer, and ultimately ended up wedging all of my PS2 and PS1 games into a very large cabinet. They took up a lot of room, and as I went through the titles, I saw that a fair number of them didn't have a lot of replay value. That having been said, I certainly wasn't about to go selling them for 50 cents apiece to some video game store. I'm still not willing to simply flush money down the tubes.

Now, a while back, I subscribed to Netflix, in order to stave off the same situation I've run into with the PS2 games. I own several very nice DVD racks, and the only problem with them is that they're entirely full and there aren't any more Wherehouse music stores going out of business to sell me more of them. Being a happy Netflix customer (since 4/28/05) convinced me that the subscription/unlimited-rental model was pretty nice, and for games it would be even better. After all, you watch a movie in about two hours, but games tend to take several days or weeks to finish. This caused me to research around and ultimately subscribe to Gamefly. Since doing so, I tend to buy about one game per quarter (which is when they award 'Gamefly Rewards' dollars, basically an expiring gift certificate towards the purchase of a game through them). Generally, whatever game I buy is one I've got out on rental through them (they just mail you the manual and box for the disc you already have), so I already know that it isn't scratched up. So, for me, Gamefly is working out pretty well. I don't go spending much on games anymore, and my game stack only picks up games I actually have played and am sure I want to own.