Was blind but now I see

I will never buy another video game.

Okay, I will buy Halo 3, but that's it. At $50 a pop, I probably have about $1,000 worth of Xbox games that I rarely play sitting in a neat little 8"-square CD case. That's ridiculous. Video games depreciate faster than anything else I can think of. If I sold my games back the best I could hope for would be about 30% of the purchase price. And this is not a car with 100,000 miles on it but a piece of optical media in perfect condition. I feel utterly foolish for having spent as much money on games as I have. Given that the next generation of games are now going for $60 each, I believe it is inevitable that most other gamers will eventually arrive at the same conclusion.

The video game industry is headed for a seismic correction, and companies like gamefly.com will lead the way. The Netflix business model which has already proven wildly successful for movies makes 10 times more sense for video games. For $9.95 a month, you can play one game for as long as you want. When you eventually tire of it, just return it and get another. If the game sucks or you beat it easily, you can get another game right away. If you play through one game a month for a year, you end up spending $120, instead of $720 if you had purchased each game. Seriously, why would anyone ever buy another video game?

Except for Halo 3, of course.