GameFly Streaming

» see gamefly.com/streaming as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

gamefly streaming was us-only at the device licensing layer. amazon fire tv landed in turkey unofficially through grey imports and only later through a limited official channel. samsung smart tvs sold here did not carry the gamefly app. by the time the service launched in april 2015 i was 31, running a desktop windows machine for work and a console for the very rare game session. cloud gaming on a tv set i did not own, through an app store i could not access from ankara, was not in the picture.

the company itself was already an old hand. gamefly had been the netflix-for-games of the 2000s, mailing physical discs around the united states in red envelopes (a deliberate echo of netflix's pre-streaming era). the dvd rental business held up through 2014 but the writing was on the wall. the streaming pivot was the second life. gamefly licensed cloud gaming tech from playcast media, an israeli outfit founded by guy de beer, and shipped a beta on fire tv in early 2015 with a catalogue of around seventy titles.

the pricing was modest. one tier ran 6.99 a month with a small library. the higher tier was 14.99 with more recent games. samsung smart tvs got the app in 2016 through the samsung tv plus channel storefront. there was no separate dedicated hardware. the box you already owned ran it.

~ the case file ~

~ what it actually was ~

gamefly streaming was not in the conversation that onlive and gaikai had been in five years earlier. onlive had been the first attempt at consumer cloud gaming and gaikai had been the smarter pivot. sony bought gaikai. onlive collapsed. by 2015 the cloud gaming category was dormant in the consumer press. gamefly slipped a service into that quiet stretch without much marketing.

the games were mostly mid-list titles, two or three years old at launch. you got things like batman arkham origins and mafia ii. no day-one aaa, no full publisher catalogues. the picture quality on a steady fifteen-megabit line was decent for the era. the input lag was the kind of thing reviewers worried about and most casual players ignored.

~ what replaced it ~

on 22 may 2018 ea announced it had acquired gamefly's cloud gaming tech assets and the israeli team behind them. ea did not buy the gamefly brand or the dvd business. it bought the engine. that team became one of the building blocks of ea's later cloud experiments, which themselves did not turn into a real consumer product before google stadia and microsoft xcloud showed up.

gamefly announced the streaming shutdown a few weeks after the acquisition. last day of service was 31 august 2018. subscribers were not charged again past that date. the dvd rental side of gamefly kept running for another stretch, the older business outliving the newer one for a while, until the discs themselves stopped making sense.

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