This past month I finally decided to give Gamefly a try. Gamefly is a video game rental service similar to Netflix, being that rentals are sent through the mail. There is a monthly charge for the service, which includes free shipping, no due dates and no late fees. Gamefly was founded in 2002 and has since then grown into a popular business. The end of the year report for 2010 shows that Gamefly’s total revenue had increased 32.2% to $85.5 million from $64.4 million 2008. Their total subscribers in 2010 was 328,000.
My experience with Gamefly was a good one. I had received an email from them offering an extended free trial of 30 days. Normally the trial is 10 days. I signed up for it and picked out from a wide variety of PS3, Wii, Xbox 360, and even older console games. The trial was for their 2 games out at a time service. I chose Catherine and L.A. Noire as my first two choices. Now here is where I ran into a problem. I provided them with a shipping address which was for my college P.O. Box. I had received an email from customer service saying there was a problem with the address and to contact them. I replied to the email and almost a week later I had not heard from them. I discovered that Gamefly customer service has a live chat available. I don’t believe that it is widely known therefore the wait time is only less than a minute usually. The first person I spoke to I explained that my P.O. Box address was correct and that I will receive their envelopes. The employee told me that she forced the address into the system and that it would work. About a week and half later I still had not received anything in the mail and my account still told me that I needed to contact customer service. At this point I was frustrated. I had lost about 2 weeks of my free trial waiting for games that hadn’t even shipped yet. So I signed back into the live chat and spoke to another employee. I explained my ordeal yet again and that the address would work. He apologized for the inconvenience, gave me back my 2 weeks I had lost, and said that he would personally monitor my account to make sure that I would have games shipped to me. He was very nice and knowledgeable about his job. A couple days later I received my two games.
Catherine was the first game I played, and I didn’t even think to check that L.A. Noire would work. After playing Catherine, I discovered that L.A. Noire was damaged and would not work in my console. Yet again, I signed into live chat, explained my ordeal, and the employee apologized and immediately sent me another copy, which did work. The only bad part was that L.A. Noire counted as my second game in both transactions so I only got 3. In a period of about 20 days I had received and completed 3 games. I had another week to order more games, but due to school I stopped at 3.
Despite the fact that I had a couple of issues with shipping addresses, and damaged games, I did enjoy my time using Gamefly’s service. The customer service was very good, the shipping time was very fast, their selection of games is very extensive. I would very much love to subscribe to them again possibly during the summer when there is more time. Gamefly’s prices per month run:
- 1 game out at a time-$15.95 per month
- 2 games out at a time-$22.95 per month
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