Gamespot got the opportunity to sit down and interview, Sean Spector, the CEO of Gamefly, about their business and developments in the video game industry. While Spector doesn’t give out any of the juicy statistics like how many subscribers they have or whether or not they have any plans to partner with Netflix further down the road, he does talk quite a bit about their service and makes a compelling case for why they offer such great value to their customers.
Currently a little over 50% of their customer base are actually Xbox 360 renters. With most new 360 games running $60, Gamefly creates a nice alternative for gamers who don’t want to own the titles, but still need content to play. I typically buy 4 – 6 video games per year and at just $15 per month, I’d likely save money by using Gamefly, but in the past I’ve tried them and cancelled after being frustrated that I could never get copies of the games that I really wanted to play. Personally, I prefer owning the game anyways because there is something nice about being able to go back to a game 6 months later, play it for a half an hour and then go onto the next game. If I only played games for a month or two, Gamefly would be a good solution, but I still go back to some of my original Xbox games and play those today, so I’m not likely to change my buying patterns.
Where Gamefly is a huge benefit is that you can try out a lot more games and see if you like them. If you do like the games you can keep them at pretty competitive prices. Over my life I’ve always stuck to games that I’ve been pretty sure that I would like, but once in a while I see a title I’ve never heard about and am not willing to spend the money to try something new. Gamefly would offer me the ability to take chances on titles and if I liked them I could always still buy them.
I’ve always felt that Netflix should be including game rentals with their service, but they’ve been focused on movies the whole time. This makes sense from a finance point of view because video game titles are much more expensive and the life cycle for a lot of games is pretty short, but from a customer stand point, it would be nice to have access to more then just movies with the service and I would be willing to bet that the turnover times on games is a lot slower then the turnover time for movies. At some point down the road, we may see Netflix integrate this service, but for now, Gamefly has set the gold bronze standard for the video game by mail business, even if they only happen to have one shipping hub.