I have been a religious PC gamer since I bought my first computer. I only succumb to buying game consoles years after they came out and have dropped to a reasonable price. Recently, however, I took the plunge and decided to buy and Xbox 360.
I did some research and decided to go with a Xbox 360. There were more games I was interested in playing available for the Xbox than the PS3 and the Xbox was also more affordable. I bought a newer version of the Xbox 360 Arcade for less than $100 used from Amazon.com. It works great and looks brand new. I also purchased a 60BG hard drive for about $30.
I have been very happy with my Xbox (aside for having to pay $50 for an "Gold" membership if I want to play games online) but I needed some games. I had a list of around 40+ games I wanted to play and at a price of $20-$60 each there was no way I was going to get them all. To solve my problem I signed up with GameFly. I was already a Netflix member and have been very happy with that service, so I figured renting games online was the next logical step.
GameFly is great, for $22.95 a month you can get two games out at a time (I recommend this plan so you always have at least one game while you are waiting for the next to arrive). Do the math and you will see that GameFly will most likely end up saving you money.
Here is the breakdown:
If you rent two games a month from GameFly rather than buying two at $60 you just saved $100! Also, it's not just about the money you can save but how many more games you can afford to play. A one year subscription to GameFly (two games out at a time) will cost you $253 (minus your first month free). That works out to be about the same price as buying four new games. If you plan on buying four games or more over the next year GameFly will save you money!
The only drawback to renting games vs buying, that I can think of, is not being able to play them again after you return them, but you can always keep your saved games on your console and rent them again later.
Games ship out fast and will take about two or three days to arrive. The GameFly site is very user friendly, just search for the games you want and add them to your game queue. When you return a game and GameFly receives it they will send out the next game on your list.
Sign up for GameFly using my referral link and you can get one month free!
Sign up here!
