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GameFly, the Netflix of games, files for IPO

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 1 min

GameFly has become the first game company to file for an initial public offering in quite some time. The company said in a filing it plans to raise $50 million.

The company is like the Netflix of video games. It rents games to subscribers, who play the games and then return them. It winds up costing much less than buying games outright. The company will trade under the symbol GLFY and BoA Merrill Lynch and Piper Jaffray are lead underwriters.

GameFly reported revenue of about $47 million in the third quarter of 2009, compared to $39 million a year earlier. Operating period for the quarter was about $6 million. The company’s backers include Sequoia Capital, which owns a 51.5 percent stake, and Tenaya Capital, which owns 5.9 percent.

The company has a library of 7,000 games and more than 334,000 subscribers. It was founded in 2002.

Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.