Gameflix

Saw a post from Keen and Graev recently that alerted me to the new Gamefly digital client.  It sounds a lot like Netflix streaming but for video games. Kind of like Gamefly itself is just a copy of Netflix DVD delivery.

On one hand, paying $30 every month in order to play your games sounds high, but if you put it into perspective, that is only two MMO subscriptions. If the selection of games is diverse enough, you basically have access to every game whenever you want. You don’t get to keep any of the games, but since games are technically just a license to play the game on one computer, that doesn’t really matter to much. Many games, especially ones bought through digital delivery systems like Steam or Direct2Drive require you to be online to play them anyways.

$30 is a big price tag though. I typically buy 2-10 games a year.  The higher number only occurs when I buy cheap $5-15 games. Big new $50-60 are pretty rare. So I maybe spend $200 a year in a really good year. That’s less than 7 months worth of subscription. And if you stop paying it, you lose access to everything.

On the other hand, there are lots of games I would have liked to try, but don’t want to pay the price for them.  It’s like Netflix, there are lots of movies I’ll watch simply because I now have easy access too, that I never would have bought the DVD or gone to the theater for.

It makes me wonder, how much do game companies and movie producers make from services like Netflix and Gamefly? Cable costs average of $50/month and brings you dozens to hundreds of crappy channels. Netflix costs $10-25 and brings you hundreds of movies and TV shows. Do the makers of the shows get a bigger cut of that income than they do from cable? If so, how soon before everything is delivered via instant streaming? If not, why do they do it?

Games don’t work like tv/movies though. Games you have to buy individually, you don’t have a cable bundle already mainstream. How much can the game companies get from something like this as compared to individual purchases? Does the added revenue of people who would never buy it, but don’t want to steal it, playing via this service offset all the people who would buy it but don’t because of it?

The real deciding factor in this service is going to be how many ISP start charging for total amount downloaded. More and more of them are charging huge fees for downloading over a few gigs. The more people switch to things like Gamefly and Netflix, the more data is going to be transferred. So just as people are stepping up their data usage, ISP’s are putting a bigger price on the gate.