The protracted bad acid trip that has been the last six months of Netflix's existence appears to finally be coming down, returning to a normalcy that seemed all but abandoned when CEO Reed Hastings posted his haphazardly recorded YouTube testimonial very professional and serious video announcement of the company's plans to split it into two distinct brands: Netflix for video streaming, and a new brand, Qwikster, which would handle all disc mailing services, including the new addition of video game rentals. Somewhere along the line, Hastings presumably must have awoke, dry-mouthed and generally unaware of his surroundings, his body laid atop a mountain of recently produced Qwikster t-shirts strewn about his office, and realized all of the sudden what his ill-advised decision to run a company while high out of his goddamn mind had wrought. And with that, the Qwikster experiment came to a swift, brutal end just as quickly as it began.
However, there were a few details left dangling, like that whole video game thing, which nobody even seemed interested in talking about anymore. As it turns out, like everything else related to Qwikster, the LSD-induced fever dream of video game rentals coming to Netflix appears to have been dismissed as the lunatic ranting it apparently was all along.
Specifically, those hopes were dashed during yesterday's Netflix earnings call, in which Netflix pronounced itself to be doing just fine, proclaiming no ill effects from whatever Hastings was probably on. When asked about the previously mentioned video game rentals, the response was simply that Netflix has "no plans" to do video game rentals any time in the foreseeable future.
Instead, the company will be focusing on the usual stuff, like wooing back subscribers who were perhaps a bit put off by the crazed decision making of last September, and maybe developing 3D streaming technology, because somebody probably wants that. Presumably, a number of you out there might want video game rentals too, but seriously, stop asking about that. It brings up too many bad memories.
It's an unsurprising, if disappointing development, given that Netflix's highly efficient (and rather costly) mailing system seemed like it would probably run circles around the company's nearest potential competitor, Gamefly. Now the folks at Gamefly can rest easy knowing that the drug-addled Netflix behemoth won't be showing up on their doorstep with a machete and a wild look in its eye any time soon, and they can continue providing the sort-of-okay-given-that-nobody-else-is-even-bothering-to-do-this service they're so well known for.