As you read this column, the FairPlay boycott week will probably either be in progress or have just ended, so you’ll know before The Man On The Street whether it made any noticeable difference to game sales that week or not.

As your reporter writes, it looks like it could go either way. Hundreds of thousands of gamers have visited the campaign’s website so far, and the site’s poll asking whether games are an overpriced rip-off or not has attracted a massive 83% “Yes they are” vote from the tens of thousands of visitors who’ve voted.

There’s one thing about the whole business that’s for sure, though - whether the FairPlay campaign goes away or not, the issue of game pricing certainly isn’t going to. 83% is a heck of a proportion of your customers to be thinking they’re being ripped off, and the games industry will simply be storing up trouble for the future if it plans to blithely ignore the issue and hope that it goes away.

Unfortunately, ignoring the issue and hoping it goes away seems to be the industry’s main gameplan. The most worrying thing about FairPlay was that while the industry was happy to launch lazy, cynical and inaccurate smear campaigns at the protesters, it singularly failed to come up with a single coherent defence of why games ought to cost so much. In its confused mess of lashing out blindly – first claiming that games were hour-for-hour better value than movies or albums, then insisting that, in fact, you couldn’t compare games to movies or albums at all because they were completely different things – evading the issue, and insulting journalists for daring to be interested in the story at all, ELSPA and the rest of the industry did far more PR damage to itself than FairPlay ever could have. What was needed was a rational, reasonable debate on the issue. What the industry delivered to the public was the hysterical screeching of a business that looked for all the world like it had something to hide.

And of course, it did. Fortuitously arriving during the campaign were a whole clutch of news stories that proved most of FairPlay’s core points beyond dispute. The claim that hardware companies were doing their best to rip off consumers? Nintendo’s stunning £100m fine for illegal price fixing backed that one up pretty strongly. The industry’s counter-argument that games having a smaller market than albums etc necessitates the obscenely higher price despite the near-identical development and manufacturing costs? Comprehensively blown out of the water by Vice City shifting more copies in two days than even super-hyped music acts like The Strokes have sold in six months.

FairPlay’s claim that the industry’s current economic model is disastrously flawed also looked good as Infogrames laid off hundreds of staff and the likes of Rage and Capcom posted huge losses despite having big hits during the financial year. The two things that were made most abundantly clear by the FairPlay campaign were that (a) there’s a case to answer about software pricing, and (b) the software industry is afraid to answer it. Neither of these facts is likely to escape the public.

So where will all this leave the nation’s retailers? Chances are, even if the FairPlay campaign has no immediate results in terms of changing the levels of custom, it’ll leave shops moving further along the path they’ve been travelling of late, with more and more floor and shelf space in game shops being devoted to bargain bins and second-hand software. The margins are decent (giving a punter 16 quid trade-in for a fortnight-old copy of Vice City that you can then punt out at £30 is a better deal than most distributors will offer you on brand-new copies) and there’ll always be a year-round market for the quality games that didn’t sell at Christmas because the boneheaded industry insisted on releasing 30 triple-A titles to compete with each other in one month.

The second-hand business is the most thriving sector of the entire games industry, and it’s likely to continue to grow in the future. Which is good news for retail, of course. Except that, as an ever-growing proportion of the money spent on games never gets anywhere near a software publisher or developer (who get nothing from second-hand sales, of course), in a few years time the nation’s retailers may just find themselves with almost no new games to sell at all. And even EA have limits on how many versions of FIFA they can produce in one year...