The videogames magazine industry released its new ABC circulation figures a couple of weeks back.

Despite being for the traditionally better half of the year (June to December), they showed a continuation of the downward trend of the last generation, with some spectacularly bad results (Xbox Gamer plummeting from 35,000 readers a month to barely 20,000) and some merely disappointing ones (Official Playstation 2 Magazine failing again to increase its readership despite the PS2 userbase still rocketing up at record speed, leaving the mag with barely 40% of the sales that its PS1 predecessor had at a similar point in that console's lifecycle).

Even the PC games magazines, which should be immune to the volatile cyclical behaviour of the console market and ought to benefit from the ever-growing sales of PC games, also continue to slide, with the likes of PC Gamer and PC Zone having now shed a third of their readerships since their peak in the late 1990s despite the continued growth of PC gaming.

(The number of magazines in the market has shrivelled too, with many traditional games-mag publishers having abandoned the dwindling sector in recent years, leaving one company - the Bath-based Future Network - with an effective monopoly.)

Observers have reacted largely without surprise to this trend, attributing it (depending on their viewpoint) either to the largely atrocious quality of the magazines themselves - which are produced on ever-decreasing editorial budgets by teams stretched to breaking point at the hands of a bloated layer of penny-pinching middle management which also exerts ever-heavier pressure on editorial teams not to do anything which might upset advertisers – or to the vast availability of online coverage of videogames.

(This is nonsense, though, as most strikingly demonstrated by the spectacular failure of the print mags' attempts to corner the market in online games coverage. Despite investing dizzying sums of money in online ventures like Future Gamer and Daily Radar, and having the enormous advantage of the vast resource infrastructure of their print-publishing arms to draw on, the ventures were all disasters and all the games-mag publishers now maintain only token web presences, usually consisting of nothing more than "trailers" for their print mags. The only logical conclusion that can be drawn from this is that consumers want fundamentally different things from online and print games coverage, yet the publishers stubbornly persist in producing magazines which are essentially mediocre out-of-date websites on paper.)

In fact, retail chums, the truth is that the decline of games magazines is largely YOUR fault. The widespread and increasing practice of games retailers offering no-quibble refunds if consumers don't like the game they've just bought, has struck a huge blow to games mags' original raison d'etre - to advise consumers whether particular titles were worth spending their money on or not. Why listen to the opinion of some incompetent, semi-literate chump who might not like the same kind of games you like - and who isn't allowed to criticise big games publishers anyway - when you can try the whole game out yourself for 10 days, form your own opinion and still get your money back if it's no good? (Or if you've finished it...) With their information out of date thanks to the web, and their reviews irrelevant, all games mags have left to offer is to be entertainment in their own right, and most of them are about as entertaining as watching Middlesborough away, hence the gathering speed of their journey down the dumper.

Of course, there’s no reason that you should be sad about games magazines being on the way out. Or is there? Because while games mags don’t tend to reach the casual gamer, they’re still highly influential among the dedicated games fans - who are, after all, exactly the sort of people likely to be doing their games buying in an indie retailer rather than a High Street chain in the first place. So since The Man On The Street is in a constructive frame of mind this year, he’s going to give you another great idea for free. Why don’t YOU make one?

Some game stores already produce their own little mini-mags, of course – essentially brochures, often with discount coupons and the like, given away for free to customers. But when you’ve got a captive audience, why not sell them stuff instead of giving it away? Punters aren’t daft enough to trust the “reviews” in an advertising brochure, but a proper monthly games magazine, exclusive to shops (and which you could sell for half the price of news-stand mags, since the newsagents wouldn’t be taking a big fat cut), would serve the triple purpose of generating sales on good games, helping you make reliable stocking decisions, AND give people something else to come into your shop for.

Nobody’s asking you to write such a mag, naturally. Or even to fund it. This reporter knows that trying to get indies to act together on anything complicated and/or requiring expenditure is like trying to teach cats to line-dance. But if somebody were to make one (and no, The Man On The Street isn’t volunteering), it’d be a pretty neat development for all the nation’s indies, would it not? So why don’t you ask them to?