If anyone knows the answer to the question in last month’s letters page (“What is Stuart Campbell for?”), could they pass it on to this reporter, please? He’s been wondering for a while.

Anyway, this month, rather than the usual strident assertion of dubious semi-facts and sledgehammer polemic, The Man On The Street has a question of his own for you, his beloved retailer pals. And the question is this question that’s coming up right now: “Do you consider yourselves to be a part of the ‘videogames industry’ or not?”

It’s a genuine question – your correspondent honestly doesn’t know the answer. The reason for asking it is something The Man On The Street happened across on a Usenet newsgroup recently, the thrust of which was this: “The games industry is always bleating on about how much it’s allegedly damaged by piracy. But isn’t it in fact the case that far MORE damage is done to the industry by legal second-hand sales?” It seemed an interesting slant on the issue, so The Man In The Street decided to look into it.

It’s only when you bring the subject up that you realise quite how odd the situation with second-hand games is. You don’t, after all, walk into Dixons and see a load of second-hand TVs for sale beside the shiny new Sonys. You don’t find half the floorspace in Gap taken up by second-hand clothes. And you don’t go to HMV and expect to be able to buy a load of traded-in albums and DVDs. Yet in pretty much every dedicated game shop in Britain, whether indies or the biggest chains, you’ll find between 20% and 50% of the sales space devoted to used games. The Man On The Street can’t think offhand of a single analogous area of leisure/consumer culture - with the possible (though very different) field of automobiles – where the PRIMARY source of sales devotes so much of its resources to shifting product that brings absolutely no income to its producers.

So what’s the problem with this? The problem, of course, is that second-hand game sales make the exact same amount of money for their developers and publishers that a pirate copy sold down the market does – zero pounds and zero pence. And what’s more, second-hand games are legal and socially acceptable, so the trading of them is far more widespread than the trading of illegal pirate copies. And in the case of consoles at least, piracy also requires offputting investment in protection-evasion measures like chipping, which is another significant barrier to the average punter in the street. And thirdly, someone who buys or trades pirate games is someone who, by definition, was unlikely to have coughed up for the legitimate version, whereas someone who walks into a High Street game shop is someone who was clearly quite likely to buy a new game, until he noticed that he could get two great second-hand ones instead.

The pirate hasn’t cost the industry a penny in real terms, because he was never going to give it anything in the first place. The chap walking out of GAME with two pre-owned titles instead of one new one (yes, okay, that’s a wildly generous estimate of GAME’s usual pricing policy on pre-owned games, but you get the drift) has GENUINELY just deprived the industry of 40 quid. (And what’s more, with two new-to-him games to play instead of one, it’s probably going to be twice as long before he comes back again. Plus, and The Man On The Street hesitates to raise the issue again, our hypothetical customer may be starting to get used to the idea of paying slightly more sensible prices for his games and developing a resistance to paying 40 quid plus for anything in the future.) It seems to this reporter that we may have just solved the mystery of why top-line revenues for the industry keep going up and up, yet publishers and developers are going out of business faster than ever.

So the question, retail pals, is really this: Do you see yourselves as a part of the videogames industry, in which case you’re suicidally cutting your own throats by starving developers and publishers of much-needed revenue, or as a separate industry altogether, in which case by offering second-hand sales you’re acting as parasites, living off and simultaneously damaging your host? The Man On The Street is curious to know the answer.