14 DAY TRIAL // GameFly, one of the biggest video game rental services, has announced that it has acquired the digital distribution service Direct2Drive, which was created and maintained so far by IGN, itself a subsidiary of the Fox media empire.
The two companies have not revealed any details about the transaction, including the amount of money paid for Direct2Drive.
IGN will get a minority equity stake in GameFly and News Corp will get an observer position on the board of directors of the company.
David Hodess, who is the chief executive officer of GameFly, has said, “We're very excited to bring the D2D team onboard at GameFly and expand our ability to deliver games to consumers. Only GameFly can offer a complete library of physical and digital games for the PC, Mac and consoles in one place.”
At the moment, there are more than 3,000 video games for both the Windows powered PC and the Mac available on Direct2Drive and in the last few months the service has been very aggressive in its promotional policy, offering a lot of pretty significant discounts via sales and staging launch events for the most important PC video games.
GameFly is a subscription-based rental service, allowing gamers to pay a monthly fee in order to get access to the titles they want without needing to pay full retail price.
It's not clear whether the GameFly rental concept will be extended to Direct3Drive in order to expand the operations of the company or whether rental will remain restricted to the physical mediums while digital distribution will be reserved for full game sales.
The PC digital distribution market is being dominated by the Valve-created Steam service, which is estimated to be in charge of more than 70 percent of the market.
Recently, retail giant GameStop has bought the rival Impulse service from Stardock.