GameFly
For Christmas we got our son a 2 month subscription to GameFly.com. With as many games as he rents this is our second monthly charge rental service we’ve tried. The other was a local service provided by Hollywood Video.
With as many games as he asks for as presents, saves up his money for and otherwise purchases we always insist he rent before he buys. I don’t know how many times we’ve bought him a game only to find that he either didn’t like it or it was so easy he finished it in days. Return policies on video games bite too and you rarely can get your money back. At $50 a pop that can be an expensive mistake, especially for an 11 year old’s pocketbook.
It was easy enough for our son to activate the account on the Gamefly website. The only time he really needed our help was to input our credit card info. The one thing you do have to watch though is to cancel the service before the prepaid subscription runs out or it will bill directly to your card. It would be nice if you could ask to be notified 3 days before a credit card billing goes through. Otherwise the whole billing and account creation set up was very easy and user friendly.
I sat with him as he picked his list of games. It shows the availability for each rental and information blurb about the game. You just click a button to add it to your list. It’s easy and user friendly also and they have many ways you can browse the games - by system or catagory or search.
Shipping is free. Maybe it’s because we did it right on Christmas day but it took like 4 or 5 days to get the games initially. They are shipped in very easy to use packages that you reuse to ship them back. Again it’s so easy that my son at 11 was able to open, reseal and return the games without adult intervention. He just yesterday sent one game back so I’ll have to let you all know how long it takes to get the next game in his queue.
So far the service is nice overall. It’s very user friendly and inexpensive. We’ll see how our son continues using the service to see if we keep it. And if his grades continue to stay up there! =) I give this service an A- OK for now!