| BMaker11 said: Gamefly: Doing just fine right now. $23 a month for 2 games out at a given time. Redbox: Doing just fine right now. $2/day. $60/month for a game PSNow: apparently, terrible prices. $10 for a month for a game (like KZ3 and FFXIII-2....nice try with Critter Crunch, though). 2 games = $20 for the month. Non-Sony game rental services: such fairer price. much consumer friendly. |
Gamefly is a subscription based service like Netflix. Using it as an example doesn't really help your cause, no matter what games and rental lengths you pick to try and tip the scales in your favor. For example I have the 3 games at a time plan for $30 a month. That's 3 retail games at any given time. In a given month I may play 10 games, at the least. The two games you listed both follow the $3 -> $6 -> $8 -> $15 progression of pricing. Now, in order to enjoy say, 10 games, as I can easily on Gamefly in a given month, even if I chose the absolute cheapest rental price, $3, that's a paltry 4 hours per title. If I went a step up to a more reasonable 7 days per title, well, suddenly I'm paying double what I would pay on Gamefly. Plus with Gamefly I earn GF rewards and get access to discounted games. Not to mention that the games I am getting from Gamefly are actual real reliable disc based games. Not a streaming service, which can go down, or experience latency, etc. You can sing the praise of PS Now's performance until the cows come home, it will never replicate having the disc inside your console. Which is fine, by the way, since it's not SUPPOSED to do that. But then don't make the comparison.
I would stop throwing out Redbox, too. They missed their profit expectations in their last financial report, have lower YoY revenue, and even they are getting into the subscription based market with the Verizon thing they have. Which I have tried by the way, and it sucks. A vast majority of the business at Redbox is movies. You're reaching trying to include them.
And either way, even if these two other businesses were good examples (they aren't), it doesn't touch the point of my post. If there were competitors to Sony in this area, they'd had never even launched this beta with such stupidly awful prices. But Sony is making sure there isn't any competition, which is allowing them to even try this junk. Soon enough consumers will speak and they will offer the subscription package and lower prices, and you'll have something else to praise them for.
