From time to time, viewers, Gamer asks me if I’ll make Hard Wired about a particular topic, rather than just writing down the first load of old rubbish that comes into my head that week.

And this week was one of those weeks. “Stu,” they said, “Why don’t you write something about how stupid it is that the games industry releases hundreds and hundreds of great games in the four weeks around Christmas, when people won’t possibly be able to afford to buy them all, and then doesn’t bring out any decent games at all for the rest of the year when people have money burning holes in their pockets? After all, Christmas is the most expensive time of year anyway, so people are likely to have even less money spare than they usually do.

"And sure, that’s balanced out by the whole present thing, where lots of games are bought as gifts, especially for youngsters who can’t actually afford to buy games throughout the year because unlike the old days when the Spectrum was king, you’d have to save up pocket money for about six months to buy one PS2 game. But even allowing for that, it can’t make any sense to waste your efforts putting out all your good games in December, when only one or two are going to have a chance of selling and a load of perfectly good titles are going to be overlooked as punters try to fight their way through crowds of grannies in Electronics Boutique all buying six copies of Harry Potter.

"Sony have shown with the Gran Turismo series, for example, all of which were released in summer, that if you put good games out they’ll sell in huge numbers no matter what time of year it is. So why do all the other game companies stubbornly refuse to learn the lesson? Is it that they think their games are all rubbish, and wouldn’t sell to the more discerning non-Christmas customer? After all, in these ever-more-savvy days, the only sure way of flogging duff games is to target the under-10s, who’ll play anything with a WWF licence on it without even really noticing that it’s exactly the same rubbish they bought last year with a different menu screen.”

“I’m glad you’re paying for this phone call”, I said.

“But that surely can’t be it,” Gamer continued. “If you look at the charts at the moment, there’s a huge amount of genuinely high-quality software in there. Grand Theft Auto 3, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3, Pro Evolution Soccer, World Rally Championship, Half-Life, Return To Castle Wolfenstein, Championship Manager, Silent Hill 2, Shenmue 2, The Italian Job, Burnout, Headhunter… these are all great games that would surely sell at any time of year. And yet some of them are hanging around the tail end of the top 40 - or even lower - selling pitiful numbers because all the money’s going on Harry Potter, Agent Under Fire, Pokemon and terrible quiz games. And by January, when people have money again, they’re not going to want to buy those games because they’ll be old hat, and because they’ll all be saving up for Metal Gear Solid 2, or maybe for an Xbox or a Gamecube in the springtime. So all the millions that were spent developing and advertising those great games will turn out to have just been a big fat waste of cash.”

“Championship Manager?”, I queried. “Are you drunk?”

“Well, whatever. But it makes no sense. The only possible explanation is that one that you always come out with, which is that the software industry is run by useless idiots who are pathologically incapable of understanding the simplest economic concepts, in this instance the concept that people have a finite amount of money at Christmas and maybe it would be clever if you tried to get them to buy games all year round instead of risking your entire company on four weeks in December when the competition is suicidally intense. But if that was true, the software companies would also do incredibly stupid things like continue to spend loads of money developing, for example, third-rate football racing games like David Beckham Soccer and Simpsons Road Rage, in the hope that tacking on some shoddy licence would be enough to dissuade people from buying the games which have had those genres sewn up tighter than a drum for the last five years, namely FIFA, ISS, Gran Turismo, Crazy Taxi etc. And nobody’s that stupid, are they?”

“You seem to have rather answered your own question there, Gamer”, I said.

“Ah. Yes. Oh dear. So anyway, when can we expect the column?”

“Column? What column?”