The Price Of Geekdom

Editor's Note: Over the next month, TwitchGuru will examine the high cost of being a technology enthusiast on the cutting edge and explore ways to lower investments in gaming and digital entertainment. In this installment, we focus on more affordable ways to support your gaming habit.

How can I play as many games as possible and still afford to pay the bills? That's a question that has bugged me ever since college, which is when my parents decided to cut off my Nintendo allowance and no longer rewarded me for getting A's in grade school. I figured it was time to look for ways to spend less money on the games themselves, and I decided to use myself as the initial subject.

I hate paying $60 for a game, and I don't care much for buying used copies, because you're usually only saving between $5 and $10 for recent releases and getting a case that's beat to crap and a disc that looks like it's been used as a coaster. Since we frown upon software piracy, we've ruled out stealing games. So that left me with trying game rentals.

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I decided to give GameFly a shot last year, simply because it seemed like the best way to get a hold of a wide variety of console games without paying a whole lot of money. And it was - GameFly has quite an extensive library, and enabled me to play older games that were hard to find. Every Blockbuster/GameRush and other rental stores are going to have the newest hit titles for the next-generation (now current generation) platforms, but GameFly, like Netflix before it, won me over by granting me access to content that otherwise would be hard to come by. Since I didn't feel like paying upwards of $80 to buy a brand new copy of Silent Hill via Amazon.com, paying $21.95 a month to rent the game and others instead seemed like a better option.

But I started feeling like maybe GameFly wasn't quite worth the money I was paying. This was for a couple reasons. First, I found the return and delivery system for GameFly to be significantly slower than Netflix's well-oiled machine. Second, GameFly has a plethora of titles, but it doesn't always feel like it has enough copies; as a result, you can sit with Silent Hill at the top of your queue for months listed as "Very Long Wait" and never get it because someone in Idaho is hogging the only copy.

I started breaking down the cost of GameFly and the actual savings. If I stick with GameFly for the full year at my present membership plan of two games at a time, then I'll have spent $263.40. That seems like a lot of money to play a bunch of games one time but not actually own the content. However, I started thinking about how much money I spent to own games in 2006. Then I was really shocked. I've prided myself on being a very selective consumer, one who doesn't feel the need to rush out and buy every hot title at full price the week it comes out. But I started adding everything up, and good heavens, all of the sudden I was the Big Spender.

I started with next-generation titles: I bought Gears of War the day it went on sale for the full stinking price of $59.99. Sure, it was probably worth it. So was Dead Rising. But Call of Duty 2 certainly wasn't, and it nearly killed me. Ditto for GUN. I'm not even out of the Xbox 360 yard, and already I'm fast approaching the $263.40 mark.

Then I realized that the bulk of the games I've play over the last two months have been launch titles for the Wii, and I hadn't spent a dime of my own money on them, thanks to the TG Trust Fund for Gaming. I can say without hesitation that I would have shelled out $49.99 for The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess and at least two other titles (most likely Excite Truck and Marvel: Ultimate Alliance). In addition, I surely would have forked over another $59.99 for Resistance: Fall of Man, though that would most likely be the only PS3 launch title I purchased out of the gate. Suddenly, I'm at $206.96 now.

Sh*t.

And this isn't even taking into account my sizeable and expensive PC gaming habit. I've always prided myself on being a skeptical and selective consumer. I waited months for critically lauded games like God of War just to save $20, and I'm prone to buying titles that end up in Platinum Hits/Greatest Hits/Players Choice bargain bins a year after their initial releases (more on that later). Still, it was evident that I could blow a whole lot of money on just a handful of games and have little to show for it.

GameFly And BrightSpot.tv

Luckily, something came along that helped tilt the scale in favor of GameFly. I received a curious e-mail last month from GameFly that offered a very simple way for me to save $5 a month off my GameFly subscription: BrightSpot. Hot diggity!

I had never heard of Brightspot.tv, but I was intrigued. Essentially, the Wbe site works like Netflix or GameFly but with commercials, and instead of paying BrightSpot, the company pays you to watch commercial spots. You have a queue, which lists up to six commercials. You play the spots, which can last anywhere from 30 seconds to more than a minute, and then you respond to a few survey questions about the particular company and/or industry. In return, your account receives 50 cents per spot, and you can then apply your earnings to selected bills from service providers like GameFly.

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Here's how it worked. BrightSpot.tv's BrightMatch feature allows each user to request certain types of commercials based on a series of questions concerning the user's tastes and buying habits. I filled out the questionnaire, indicating my preferences for movie, games, comics and technology commercials. Then I made my way to the queue. First up was a quick commercial for Marvel Comic's "Civil War" series. When it was finished playing, a couple of survey questions appeared below the viewing window. The questions were simple - "Do you read comic books?" and "Have you ever seen a superhero movie?"-and the answers to both were yes.

It doesn't take long to complete all six spots and their corresponding questions, but the process can be annoying sometimes. For example, every time I receive a commercial for a new rock album, I get three or four questions asking me if I buy music online or in a store and if I use iTunes, Amazon, Best Buy, Wal-Mart or whatever. I've noted in my survey questions that I don't eat fast food, yet I receive a new McDonald's commercial every time I update my queue. And on a couple of occasions, I'll receive two spots for the same company on my queue, which seems like a waste.

According to my membership plan, I can earn up to $5 a month in credit from BrightSpot.tv, which will then be applied to my GameFly subscription. So watching 10 commercials a month will get me a nice little discount on my game rentals. Now, I'll be honest and confess I feel a little bit whorish, because I'm pretty much selling myself out to big business. But I figure that I'm currently skipping over the majority of television commercials these days, thanks to my DVR setup, and I don't think watching a few spots here and there on the Web will kill me (you can't fast-forward through BrightSpot ads, but you can always mute the sound if you're continually bombarded with McDonald's ads). So to me, it's worth the trade off.

So the projected total for my GameFly membership in 2007 will be $203.40. Blockbuster's Game Pass membership for GameRush stores is similar to GameFly, and it costs roughly the same amount at $21.99 per month for two games at a time. The difference is, you can pick up your games at a GameRush location rather than receiving them in the mail. While this eliminates the lag time of waiting for games to arrive in the mail, it also forces you to make quite a few tips back and forth to your local Blockbuster/GameRush. However, I don't know if GameRush has the BrightSpot offer, and I'm not sure if you can apply your BrightSpot earnings toward your Blockbuster bill. Currently, I only have two options for bills - GameFly and NBA.com's Audio League Pass, to which I don't even subscribe.

So GameFly it is; if I continue my current pace of averaging at least four games a month, that will result in playing the better part of 48 games a year for less than the price of four new next-generation games. That's not bad, considering more than half the games I've played so far via GameFly have been mediocre, disappointing or downright terrible titles that I'll never play again. So if I had bought Prey, Black and Call of Duty 3 instead of renting them, well, then I really would have thrown myself out a window.

Of course, some of the titles I rented proved themselves worthy of my purchase after the fact, albeit at a discounted price. But that's okay, too, because when I have the urge to play Splinter Cell Double Agent again in about a year, the price should be cut in half. Yes, it's still a lot of money. But I feel I'm inching ever so gently toward the unattainable nirvana of affordable gaming- at least for console gaming

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