I'm slightly familiar with Shacknews. I don't read there unless another site redirects me to an article, and that rarely happens. GameFly, I've never heard of.
I'll take a wild stab that there is there the usual cries of how such a purchase is going to affect editorial quality and bias.

It really shouldn't affect bias at all (quality, not as sure about). GameFly is just a video game rental website, with no real vested interest in any single developer or publisher, so I don't see them needing or wanting to influence the direction of Shacknews articles.

That's fair enough then.

Unless Shacknews writes some scathing piece about game rentals.

<Governor Tarkin>You're FAR too trusting</Governor Tarkin>.
I could imagine a company, for the sake of the example (and the fact they've been busted at least twice doing it), lets say Eidos saying that if certain unpleasant content about Eidos bribing or threatening websites to print only favourable news about them appeared on shacknews that an Eidos PR rep might get on the phone to gamefly and suggest, with all the subtelty of a brick thrown through a window, that they might stop letting gamefly rent their products out unless the story was pulled or given the airbrush treatment.

That's Grand Moff Govenror Tarkin..
also, i could careless about both gamefly and shacknews. nothing interesting has come out of shacknews for as long as I can remember, and renting games sux.

Could they even do that? Isn't that the same thing as saying minority's cant buy games anymore? I don't think Gamefly has any sort of contract with publishers. They buy the games same as everyone else, then they rent them out. Its not a digital rental service, its like Netflix. They send the games to you in the mail.

Yeah, but the thing is, Netflix is actually good. With Gamefly, they've only got two distribution centers (Connecticut? Really?) so their turnaround time is quite janky, I've heard. Netflix has tons of these things, and because movies have a higher chance of getting a profit (almost anyone has a DVD player, but not everyone has a console).

From what I understand with DVDs, Netflix only purchases the rights to rent them out. But with videogames, sites like Gamefly actually have to purchase the games themselves which is a lot more expensive therefore limiting their supplies.