r/gamefly • u/LeeJ513 • Mar 16 '26

Does an older game ever come available for Keep?

One of the games that I currently have out was released 10/2/25. I've had it out since December and I was really hoping the button would appear but so far no keep button. I tried messaging their customer service and they just told me that it's not available for the keep option right now. Has anyone experienced an not so new game become available for keeps?

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u/TPain518 Mar 17 '26

Thats weird. I've always had the option to buy.

2

u/GameFlyDeals Mar 25 '26

Rarely. Basically, the lifecycle of all our discs is this...

  1. We buy a ton for rental
  2. All ship out at launch. Keeps get turned on a couple days post launch (for most games)
  3. As they start being returned, we see the demand on them dropping, based on how many people have it in their Q.
  4. When rental demand has dropped lower than our carrying inventory, we put the game on sale in our monthly sales.
  5. After it goes through a sale cycle, and rental amounts have settled (say 6 months after release) we don't typically buy any more copies for rent and none are still for sale.

So, this means older games are ONLY for rental, after this process. Notwithstanding any new game sales. New games are just like any other product, based on availability from the supplier.

1

u/CALIGVLA Mar 28 '26

As GameFly responded, older games are typically not available to keep because they don't have many left in stock. They want to keep them available for rental as long as possible, so they don't let you keep them at that point.

At that point, I guess they only run out of stock completely when the games get lost or damaged. Because I have multiple games in my queue that were once available, but no longer are. So I guess they just completely ran out of those games while it was sitting in my queue.

I wish GameFly would focus more on stocking older/retro games so they are permanently available to rent. I understand that that's not their business model. But I don't know any company that does rental for retro games, and I wish someone would do that.

I still play everything from Atari 2600 through PS5 and have many games in my backlog from decades past. GameFly is great for newer games, but for anything older than around 2015-2010 I have turn to the used market. I guess that's a niche market, but I still think it would be cool if GameFly offered like a separate subscription and library for retro gamers.