Every game i've ever liked that i've rented i've regretted not buying.

I don't rent games because I replay them months and years down the line because i like gaming in general.

I just buy used. I tend to grab older games for about $10-20 off eBay, Amazon, etc. If I'm dying to play a new game I might rent but that's never been the case yet.

Well see now, that's a nice part of having gamefly. They have a keep it feature so if you rent something from them and you end up really liking it you can just opt to keep it and they send along all of the original packaging and manuals for you too.

I had Gamefly for a few months. Its a great service and it'll save you a ton of money compared to renting from Blockbuster. But getting new games can be difficult. I had to wait like a month for Iron Man and that's not even a good game.

actually, blockbuster is the same rate if you abuse their terms of agreement.

Renting a game is ~$10 for 5 days. However, you can keep it 1 extra week with no restocking fee. After that, the resstocking fee is ~$2, but you can then keep it for another 30 days. So ~42 total days of renting for ~$12. Not too bad if you play games really slowly

I do both.
With trophies hunting on the PS3 I have started to play a lot more games than in the past and have been renting a lot of them
If the game is real good I will purchase it though.
I still purchase on day one what I consider to be AAA games though.
Any game that is decent and require a lot of time will be purchased instead of being rented too...

On the positive side this has made me play and enjoy games I never would have considered even looking at in the past because if I don't like a game I can just return it so I can take some risks and try games I don't know a lot about...

All in all I think I own 20 PS3 games or so and have rented like 8-9 so far ( but only started to rent 5 months ago and got the PS3 16 months ago).

Yea, that's the biggest issue I had with it. There were times where none of the top six games on my Game-Q were available, thus they were sending me games I mainly used to pad my list and weren't that interested in to begin with. Sometimes you'd see "in stock" yet still not get that game too.

That has been an issue for me but not a big one as I tend to purchase big titles and rent less hyped one so there aren't usually as many people wanting the games on my list.

Well if you just want one game a month I guess you can go that route. But what if you rent a game that you hate? Sometimes I would send games back to Gamefly the same day I received them.

Well, there's definitely a little bit of a learning curve manipulating the queue. What you need to do is make sure to get games in there prerelease and ensure that you have an open slot for a game to ship on release day. Of course, have whatever it is in the number one position as well. I've gotten new releases this way consistently. Sometimes they even ship them the day before their official release date. That was the case for me with RE5 recently.

Another thing to keep in mind is that gamefly ships games based on availability so if the game in your #1 slot is low availability and the game in your #8 slot is high availability they're going to ship #8. If you want more of a random experience then load up your queue with a bunch of games. If you want specific games then only have those ones in there.

It's also important to log in often and tweak your queue. Game availability changes daily. I've had low availability games ship the same day. You just gotta be proactive about it.