In recent months, The Man On The Street has investigated some of the game-retailing industry’s favourite perceived enemies. The usual suspects have been dragged up in front of the court – chippers, pirates, import gamers etc – but all found, under cross-examination, to be inconveniently innocent. Meanwhile, the REAL enemy approaches, not stealthily from behind, but right under everyone’s noses as they roll out the welcome banners and get ready with the tea and cake.

The real enemy, of course, is online console gaming. While the press have been gaily predicting an explosion in online multiplayer gaming for about ten years now with no perceptible results, 2003 is shaping up to be the year all the big guns finally start to treat the business seriously. And for the nation’s beleaguered retail sector, that could be the worst news since every game publisher in the land decided to abandon the PSone two years before there was a viable successor to it.

Frankly, The Man On The Street remains as unconvinced as he ever did about the prospects for widespread online gaming. It’s just too nerdy for the mainstream gamer, and too pointless. What’s so great about going to all that trouble eschewing a CPU opponent for some invisible stranger across a phone line who might as well be a computer anyway? But Sony and Microsoft are throwing a lot of money at it (as did Sega a couple of years ago, except they forgot to actually provide any games to play), and both have something of a track record for getting punters to change their ways. This month’s issue of Edge magazine also offers a few interesting info-snippets. In Japan, where PS2 online gaming is already live, Final Fantasy XI has already attracted 120,000 subscribers at £7 a month, and Square are aiming to more than treble that in the next year. Meanwhile, Sony’s PC RPG Everquest boasts over 430,000 users, spending an average of 20 hours a week playing the game. The spacky nerds.

It doesn’t take much extrapolation, though, to work those figures into something that ought to be scaring the crap out of everyone in videogame retail. 20 hours a week is a hell of a lot of gametime – in fact, for most gamers it’d be ALL of their gametime. And all of it devoted to a game that doesn’t bring retail a penny, never gets a single body through the door of a game shop. At the moment it’s not a big problem, because precious few games garner such followings. But if MS and Sony DO manage to get online consoles to catch on, retail could find itself very suddenly frozen out of the loop altogether. Publishers have longed for years for a business model that did away with the whopping 40% cut gobbled up by retail, and now they might just have one.

The Man On The Street didn’t go to ECTS. After reading the Preview magazine, it was pretty hard to see why anyone would, (“WWE Raw, WWE Wrestlemania X8, WWE Smackdown AND Legends Of Wrestling all at the same show? Gimme a ticket NOW!”), and The Man On The Street decided to save the train fare and the pyschological trauma and spent the weekend relaxing in the glorious sunshine in his local park with his pet rats instead. Best show ever. But the gaming public is showing signs of finally tiring of the desperately hackneyed release schedules on offer from “traditional” console gaming. (Tekken 4 is, at the time of writing, conspicuously failing to take the charts by storm.)

It may just be that out of sheer boredom they’ll decide to give something new a try, and with the right sort of marketing push online console gaming could just turn out to be that exciting novelty. So while you’re all sitting in your shops, retailers of Britain, sticking pins into the eyes of voodoo dolls of pirates, chippers and importers, try to remember who it is who’s REALLY trying to put you out of business. Like Saddam Hussein, you’ve survived the first assault, but only because it was mounted in a half-hearted way that never really stood a chance of anything other than a superficial success. This time, though, the big guns are moving in, and they’re looking pretty serious about it. The Man On The Street advises you to get into your tanks, man the barricades, and check the fuel levels in your escape helicopters. Just in case.