It’s been an interesting month for The Man On The Street. As an active supporter of the FairPlay campaign (http://www.fairplay-campaign.co.uk, over 60,000 unique visitors a week so far), your intrepid reporter has been extensively vilified, libelled and generally abused by much of the videogames industry and its tame lapdogs.

One developer went so far as to liken The Man On The Street to the Washington sniper, which seemed to your correspondent to be a little crass even by the limited social standards of the average programmer.

Interestingly, though, one sector of the industry which has largely failed to join in the outcry over FairPlay’s suggestion that gamers boycott all new software purchases for the first week of December is the exact sector which would appear to have the most to lose – independent retail. Much of the industry’s hysterical outrage towards FairPlay has been centred on a hand-wringing pleas to consider the effect on poor independent retailers, who may be so damaged by sales being postponed a week that they’ll all go to the wall, and from there to the gutter. The Man On The Street finds it impossible to remove the image of Maud Flanders from The Simpons imploring “Won’t somebody PLEASE think of the children?” at this point.

Retailers themselves, however, don’t seem to be buying this sentimental hogwash (your reporter is, of course, writing these words unaware of any avalanche of hatemail to the contrary which may be currently descending on the offices of The Indie). Every single email the campaign has received from an independent retailer has been supportive, with some online retailers going to far as to replace their “buy” links with banners linking direct to the FairPlay site.

But why would indie retailers take this view of a campaign telling people not to buy games? For one thing, they obviously well know that a one-week blip in sales, the vast majority of which should be recouped the following week by pent-up demand even if the campaign is a major success, is not the sort of thing which poses problems to even the most remotely competent of businesses. But more important, perhaps, is the fact that for once, someone is discussing the ludicrous price of videogames without making the put-upon retailer the scapegoat. Game shops don’t take a bigger margin on games than any other sort of retailer does on leisure-culture items like movies or music, yet because the price of games is so high, retailers take the brunt of criticism. In fact, because games are so prohibitively priced, retailers have to unilaterally slice chunks out of their own margins just in order to shift the damn things off the shelves, so in real terms the margin on games is considerably LESS than on most similar items.

What seems to be the likely cause of the unexpected support directed towards FairPlay from retailers is the realisation that if the price of games were to be cut in half, most retailers would actually see their margins improved, as games priced at impulse-buy levels wouldn’t need to be heavily discounted in order to sell them. An across-the-board reduction in game prices wouldn’t just generate lots more traffic through game shops, it would also generate more profit from every customer who spent the same total amount of money. After all, if you’re selling a £40-RRP game with a £15 margin, but you have to discount it by a tenner to shift it, you’re only left with a fiver. If the game is £20, with the same percentages, but sells without having to be discounted, that’s £7.50 in your pocket – an extra £2.50 and an effective 50% margin increase, even BEFORE you take into account the increased unit sales which would doubtless accompany such a price cut.

The games industry operates on a massively unsound financial model, whereby games are inherently unprofitable and firms rely on a tiny number of individual blockbusting hits in order to recoup the losses made by 95% of titles. Unfortunately for readers of the Indie, it’s retail that has to pay the price for the industry’s lack of basic economic competence.

Frankly, The Man On The Street’s recommendation to Britain’s videogame retailers is that they close down their stores from December 1 to December 8 and go on a nice relaxing holiday to the sun. There would be no better way to ensure the FairPlay campaign’s success, and it’s only if the FairPlay campaign DOES succeed that game retailers can ever hope to enjoy a return to the profitable and lucrative days of videogame eras gone by. The only question, my retail pals, is - Do you have the nerve for it?