Everybody loves a gamble, don’t they? Particularly attentive readers may have caught The Man On The Street’s beaming face on television recently, talking about the infinitely evil FairPlay Campaign. And during that time, they may have wondered “Christ Almighty, what’s that on his face? He looks like Victorian Dad.”

The answer is that an old friend of The Man On The Street, when hearing of the campaign, said “I bet you 50 quid that you’re not so sure of the power of your argument that you’ll go out in the press and talk about it while wearing a great big comedy Zapata moustache.” And well, 50 quid is 50 quid, isn’t it? But more importantly, no-one can resist a good bet.

At the time of writing this column, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City is still sitting pretty at the top of the charts, and is looking – deservedly – set to stay there for some time to come. With over two million units shifted so far worldwide, every day is going to be Christmas Day for publishers Take Two for quite some time to come. The profits from Vice City – produced in less than a year using largely existing engine technology – and GTA3 before it will bankroll 40 or 50 unsuccessful games, and guarantee the company’s security for many years to come, unless they do something REALLY stupid like try to make a full-length CGI movie out of it. And you know what, rest of the videogames industry? Anybody could have the next Grand Theft Auto. Anyone could rake in those riches. It Could Be You.

Most of us buy lottery tickets. The odds are 14 million to one, which is a figure so vast that it’s almost impossible to comprehend. So try to picture this, which is a memory from The Man On The Street’s schooldays. Imagine a wooden cube 1 metre big. Imagine that that cube is made up of tiny little wooden cubes of 1cm each.  Try to picture the space in your head, and impose the tiny little cube inside the space. Use a sugar lump or something.

That one-metre cube will hold precisely one million small cubes. So now imagine 14 of the big cubes, comprising 14 million tiny cubes. That’s effectively one enormous cube, 7 feet wide and 7 feet deep and 7 feet tall, made up of little cubes the size of a sugarlump. Now imagine that someone is pointing a gun at your head and saying “I have marked a tiny ‘X’ on the side of just one of those little cubes. You have to reach into the colossal pile of cubes, blindfolded, and pull out the right one, first time, or I’ll shoot you.” Puts a slightly new perspective on the bet, doesn’t it?

During the FairPlay Campaign, The Man On The Street had cause to examine the 2002 accounts of most of the industry’s publishers and manufacturers. 2002 being a year when little significant hardware-development expense took place, it was a relatively good year for the industry as a whole, and the entire videogames business, treated as one single unit, made a tidy net profit (in the region of $1 billion). The percentage of that net profit which was accounted for by just three companies – Sony, Nintendo and EA – was approximately 155% (ie $1.55billion). In other words, the entire rest of the videogames industry outside of those three firms actually lost over half a billion dollars between them. The licence fees of the hardware companies, and EA’s talent for exploiting other industries’ intellectual properties, has the games business sewn up tighter than a drum. It’s easy to see why they like the industry’s economic model just fine the way it is.

And everyone else? Isn’t everyone else screwed? “No, of course we’re not. Why, you only have to look at Take Two to see the proof of that. They just hung on in there and now they’ve got a good hold on the old brass ring. And just you wait. Our NEXT game will be the new Tomb Raider, the new Grand Theft Auto, the one that gets us into the Big Boys’ Club. All this money we’re losing now, all these people we’re laying off, all those studios we’re closing full of the creative talent that produces games like GTA3 in the first place, all these multiple mortgages on the future? They’re going to pay off. We’ve got a system. Can’t fail, you see. Another ‘Lucky Dip’, please.”

It’s true, readers. Put your faith in them. It Could Be You.