It Takes A Week To Ship?

I signed up for GameFly on Wednesday evening of last week (2/24) and my first game, Grand Theft Auto: Episodes From Liberty City, arrived yesterday (3/3). It took one week from the day I signed up for GameFly to receive my first game, and I have to admit that feels like a long time. If we look at Netflix as a point of comparison, we can put a return in the mail on Wednesday morning and have our next title by Saturday at the latest. There is an efficiency in the Netflix model that GameFly has not been able to capture, and I'd hoped that in the two years since I last subscribed to the service they would have made the service more efficient, but I suppose that isn't the case.

There are two reasons I dropped my subscription to GameFly after my first attempt at using the service: 1) The time it took to return and get a new title, and 2) I could never get a title from the top of my queue. At the time I did not feel that the service warranted the fee, but I recently decided to give it another shot. After all, there are several single-player titles I want to play, but not many I really want to own.

My plan for now is to give GameFly a solid two months to see if either the service has improved or if my opinions on how the service operates has changed. However, given this first game experience and the length of time that it took to get the title, I'm not so confident that either of those scenarios is likely to occur.

- Dickie