GameZnFlix

» see gameznflix.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Renting a disc through the mail was a product of the United States Postal Service before it was a product of the internet. The website only held the queue. Everything that decided whether the business worked happened in a warehouse and a mail sorting facility: how flat the envelope was, how fast a returned disc came back, how many cents each round trip cost. GameZnFlix ran that machine out of Franklin, Kentucky from 2004, and tried to do it for movies and video games at once.

That double bet is the interesting part, and the logo said so out loud: a green hand with an eye in the palm, over the words "life without pause". Netflix rented movies, GameFly rented games, and GameZnFlix decided one subscriber base could want both out of the same envelope. Plans ran from one disc out at a time up to three, with a fourteen-day free trial and the option to buy anything you liked instead of returning it. On paper the catalog covered every console anyone was still playing, from the PS2 era up through Xbox 360 and Wii.

The postage never stopped mattering. In September 2005 the company announced a contract with MailItAgain for a redesigned mailer, claiming it would cut postage roughly 40 percent, shorten delivery times and lift warehouse efficiency by about 60 percent. Those are the numbers of a business where the envelope is the product. Members meanwhile spent the middle of the decade complaining, on forums that are still readable, about discs that took a week or never turned up.

None of this reached Turkey and it structurally could not have. A rental-by-mail queue needs cheap reliable domestic post plus a population that will trust it with a disc, and in 2005 my end of the world was solving the same problem with an internet cafe and later a hard drive. The whole American argument about late fees passed over a country that had never had them in that form.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the mailer ~

Every DVD-by-mail company was really an envelope company. Netflix held patents on its own mailer design and litigated over them; GameZnFlix bought a better one from a supplier and put out a press release about it. Video games made the math worse rather than better, because a game disc in a case is heavier and more prone to being kept than a rented movie.

~ the ticker ~

GameZnFlix was publicly traded on the OTC bulletin board under GZFX, which is unusual for a company this size and explains why its accounts are still readable. On 6 September 2007 it ran a 1-for-1000 reverse split and changed the symbol to GMZN, the move a company makes when its share price has gone somewhere a decimal point cannot follow.

The filings tell the rest without commentary. Revenue of $3.6 million in 2007 came with losses over $10 million. The next year revenue collapsed to $931,000 against a net loss of $1.1 million, which means the losses shrank only because the business did.

~ what the shell became ~

The home page went dark in November 2008. The last capture of the real site is from that August, and by early December the domain was answering as something called GNFGames, then as an affiliate page advertising memberships for $4.99 a year.

Eight months after the site died the corporation renamed itself TBC Global News Network, Inc. and pivoted to business news, and in October 2015 it became InCapta Inc. The rental company was gone by then, but the listing it left behind kept trading under new names for years. That is the quieter ending for a dot-com: not a bankruptcy notice, just a ticker symbol that outlives the thing it was issued for.

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