As per Brendan Sinclair at Gamespot:
The two-year dispute between GameFly and the United States Postal Service has finally come to an end. The Postal Regulatory Commission handed down its ruling today in GameFly's dispute with the USPS, finding that the service has been unfairly giving preferential treatment to the parcels of movie rental-by-mail services like Netflix and Blockbuster Video.
Apprently USPS (United States Postal Service) had been hand sorting Blockbuster and Netflix's mail for free while charging other companies like GameFly. Hand sorting takes more time but helps prevent the costly destruction of discs if they were to pass through the normal sorting machinery (anyone who has ever gotten something damage in the mail has see first hand what can happen).
GameFly is tacitly supporting the ruling, noting that, "Overall, we are pleased that the PRC found that the basis of our complaint was legitimate. We need to read through and consider the entire document before we would be in a position to elaborate."
So what does this mean for the consumer? Not much as far as I can tell. Though GameFly was being discriminated against, one assumes that all this decision means now is that their competitors will have to pay for the additional service now, rather than Gamefly having to pay less.
So for all you disgruntled subscribers at one time or another (including myself) it doesn't seem like there is anything in this decision that would mean better service from GameFly is coming anytime soon. While in the longrun this might help them compete better against Blockbuster, and in so doing, increase their market share enough to expand distribution, which would in turn hopefully drive down costs and shipping times for customers, it's not clear at present that any of this will actually occur.
As for me, two months of horrible shipping time and few new titles ever being available left me to switch over to Blockbuster instead. And though Blockbuster's prices are lower and everything arrives promptly, they just don't have as wide-ranging an inventory, so I'm put out once again.
But what about you MyIGN-ers out there? Anyone having game-mailer success? Is their an alternative competitor out there I just don't know about?