On-Line Game Rentals

Over the years, I have been an avid Netflix rental customer and loved every minute of it as their service has gotten better over the years. I’ve since discontinuted that service only for the fact that I do not have a lot of time right now.

Now, thinking of the way DVD Movie Rentals work, I had it down to a science. I would get the DVD at home and we would watch it that night. The next day, I would take it with me to work and drop it in the mail there (It is in Philadelphia). The very next day, because the local Netflix facility is in the general area, Netflix would check in the movie, and send me out a new one. It was like clockwork!

Having that experience, I decided to investigate the on-line game rental arena. We have a PlayStation 2 that all of the family members enjoy. With that in mind, I hunted around for reviews on different on-line game rental services. I found a couple (rather dated) individual ones on the popular GameFly, and then I found Video-Game-Rental-Review.TopTenReviews.Com which had a nice side-by-side comparison.

One thing I found was that nearly all of them only have one distribution center. Well, that plainly sucks if you are on the opposite coast (east coast) from the main distribution center (west coast) and everything goes via the US Postal Service (snail mail). However, a few stood out because they have several distribution centers.

Another item to note is the differences in the ways the queues work. With Netflix, if you have something at the top of the queue that has some form of wait status (any form of wait status), it is immediately skipped and you are shipped the next available title in your queue. Not so with the game rentals. If you have anything that has any sort of wait in your queue, the system will not send you anything for 1 to 2 days as it is waiting for that item to become available.

That’s kind of a pain, if you ask me. But that’s just me.. maybe I’m the odd one out on this.

So, after carefully choosing one, I chose Gamerang.com because they got good reviews and one of their distribution centers is in the state I live in. I thought that would definitely help.

I signed up for their trial on line and happily filled up my queue. I sat back and waited for the disc to arrive. It is now 6 days later, and no disc has arrived. 🙁 I called saying that I wanted to cancel the service because it didn’t meet my expectations (I could have driven there, picked up the disc, driven it home, played and beat the game, and driven back to drop it off by this point in time), and, after some time on hold, they asked me to stay on with the compensation that they would extend my renewal period by 1 week (to make up for the lost week).

I thought that was nice of them, honestly. So, I will stick with it for now to see how it pans out. I am still leaning towards going back to the Blockbuster GamePass, though.