To be honest, my dear retailing pals, The Man On The Street feels a bit of a fraud talking to you at the end of 2003, because the year gone by marked the least amount of time spent by this reporter in videogame shops for the last two decades.

And it’s not because he bought fewer games – 2003 probably saw your correspondent spend more of his own money on gaming, one way or another, than at any time since the launch of the N64. However, the fact that practically all of that expenditure was on what the games industry regards as “illicit” gaming – import software, modchips to play it with etc, all of which necessitated online shopping because retail is now too gutless to stand up to the industry's bullyboy tactics – brings The Man On The Street back to a point he touched briefly on earlier in the year, and which marks the defining impression made on this reporter by videogame retailing in 2003. And that impression is of the utter, overwhelming irrelevance and pointlessness of it. Which makes this month’s burning question (the latest in an exciting series!) this one: Why on Earth are you all here?

Because anyone with money burning a hole in their pocket and wanting to buy a videogame would have to have more toenails than sense to go and buy it from an independent videogame retailer these days. The staff in the game stores which The Man On The Street does occasionally frequent (chiefly when he has unwanted review copies to flog) are smashing fellows, friendly and enthusiastic, but your correspondent certainly wouldn’t say that a couple of minutes of their company was worth paying 40% over the odds for a typical game. And yet, that’s exactly what the average punter is asked to do.

Practically everyone in Britain now has easy access to the internet by some means, and online shopping has become unrecognisably reliable and fast compared to even a couple of years ago. (This very week, your intrepid shopping reporter ordered some gaming-related goods from a website. Despite choosing the cheapest delivery option available – which specified “two to four working days” – and despite it being a week before Christmas and the order not being placed until 4pm, the goods arrived at 11am the next day. And they were 50% cheaper than buying the same thing in any shop in The Man On The Street’s High Street.)

Even if you’re some technophobic Luddite, though, or the sort of dribbling, Heat-reading waste of space who has to have the latest thing within 17 seconds of its release, everyone and his dog sells videogames these days. You can pop down to your local Tesco or Asda and pick up the latest blockbusters at discounted prices while you’re buying Micro Chips and cheap vodka. And the tradional argument of the specialist retailer (“But we have a much wider range!”) is meaningless to the point of laughable in the videogames industry, where there IS no stream but the mainstream. This reporter defies anyone to find games stocked by a typical indie retailer which can’t also be bought in an average branch of WH Smiths or Dixons. (Or more pertinently, from GAME, where you get the massive benefit of being able to take it back if it turns out to be crap, or if you just finish your £40 purchase in one weekend.) Indies don’t get games any earlier than chains (if anything, usually later) and don’t sell them any cheaper (if anything, more expensive, as they regularly bemoan their inability to compete with the bulk discounts given to the chains).

It wasn’t always this way. There used to be a point to independent videogame retailers. For one thing, games weren’t always the ubiquitous consumer products they are now. For another, before the current cartel-monopoly of the industry there used to be a far greater range of titles released that general-purpose shops couldn’t afford the space for. For still another, indies used to sell imports and related paraphernalia that marked them out as genuinely “specialist” stores, rather than just another brand of High Street box-shifter. And even a couple of years ago, they were the only places you could trade in used games. But now the chains have muscled in on that too, and with indies all reading from the same guide-prices hymn sheet, they can’t even offer better trade-in value than GAME’s notoriously stingy rates. (Your reporter’s own records show that trade-in games now fetch, in real terms, approximately half of what they did during the PS1 era.) 

If it seems like The Man On The Street here is merely lamenting the loss of a better, more interesting, more fun videogames industry, then there’s probably some truth in that. After all, when better than Christmas to come over all Ebeneezer Scrooge? But there’s a genuine question in there too. This reporter genuinely doesn’t understand the reason for your existence, chums. All you seem to do is moan about how hard independent game retailing is, and your correspondent can certainly see how it would be. But surely there must be a more lucrative use you could be putting that prime town-centre real-estate to? And frankly, The Man On The Street would rather see another branch of KFC or McDonald’s than the depressing, bland, generic, expensive and entirely pointless experience that is visiting the average indie games retailer these days. Popcorn Chicken is nice.