Is GameMine Better Than Gamefly?

What the heck is Gamemine?
Gamemind is the newest competitor in the online video game rental space, and champions itself as being cheaper than GameFly. They have a similar business model, in that they both offer free shipping of your video game rentals and provide the postage for you to send the games back. This is a great feature that I personally love. As we will see (below) where the two companies differ is on price and selection.

Gamefly's Little Brother

What’s Bad About GameMine?
Selection
Because Gamemine is new they only have half as many games as GameFly does, 4000 compared to 8000 respectively. For me this isn’t a big problem as long as they have the best games, I don’t care if they have some obscure game I’m not going to rent anyway (though for some titles it may be kind of cool). But if you are a gamer that is looking for particular titles, odds are you would have better luck finding it with GameFly.

Website
Gamemine’s website isn’t too fancy. When I first decided I was going to give them a shot, my first impression was this place needs a little work. I do understand that they are new and still have some kinks to work out but if you are going up against the mighty GameFly, you should be on par or better in every detail. I would also like to see them in the future get verified by Verisign.

The Good
Well there’s two really good things about them:
(1) Because they are new and have less customers they can provide a better service. They don’t have the same problems as GameFly in that you are likely to get the game you want, when you want it. Many people in our Gamefly review complained about this and it appears Gamemine is able to provide the better service because they haven’t reached the breaking point where customer service suffers due to too many users.

(2) Pricing. GameMine advertises itself as being cheaper than GameFly, which it is and is a lot cheaper when you compare both plans. For 1 game out, Gamefly works out to $183.40 [$7.95 + $15.95(x11)] where GameMine equals $107.88. This works out to almost half the price of GameFly. I first have to qualify this though, with Gamefly you get unlimited game rentals per month, where for GameMine you only get to rent 1 game per month. Now I have to qualify this again, because in reality it may work out to the same thing as many people have reported that with Gamefly they are only able to rent 1 game per month because of the lag in shipping time and not being able to get the game they want.

As for the second plan, 2 games out at a time, both companies offer unlimited rentals but with Gamemine being slightly cheaper. Gamefly works out to $264.40 [$11.95 + 15.95(x11)] for the first year whereas GameMine is $233.88 [$13.99 + $19.99 (x11)]. This is interesting because it’s not at the same discount as Gamemine’s first plan, its only a 12% discount.

Cancelling with Gamemine
Gamemine has a pretty strict cancellation procedure, you just log into your account and under “My Account” you hit “Cancel Membership”. While I do like this process, what I don’t like is that the cancellations are not pro-rata. This means that if you cancel during the month, you will not get back any of the money you paid during that month in full or even partial. I believe GameFly does their cancellations the same way and it’s a shame because if you no longer using the service why aren’t you entitled to a refund proportionate to the days you didn’t use? Unfortunately most services are like this (i.e. Cable TV, Cell phone, Internet).

What Should You Get?
I’m pretty happy with Gamemine on the first plan (1 Game Out per month) because of the price. So if your a price conscious gamer like myself, but only have time to play one game per month Gamemine make sense. However, if I did play two or more games per month I would go with Gamefly even though they are a little more because they have a wider selection and have been in business much longer.

Get 30% off Gamemine for the first month (click for details)