Best Buy's Marc Spence

It's an important part of the proposition for us. The customers told us that they wanted to see second-hand games and, generally speaking, there's a cycle of buying a game then trading it in against the price of a new one. We did customer research and the customers said, "absolutely, we want second-hand."

So, although it's relatively new to Best Buy in the US, we decided that it had to be part of the proposition from day one. Yes, we read a lot about what publishers do and don't think about pre-owned games. I think the majority of those we've worked with so far have been very supportive. They understand the need to have pre-owned. I think we've got a very strong relationship with the vendor community. Although we buy directly from Centresoft in the majority of instances, and from Gem and Microsoft, we have got very strong direct relationships with all of the gaming vendors right across the board.

And they have had an input into this store. Myself and James Cook who runs gaming and is ex-HMV, ex-Virgin and WH Smith - he's got a lot of gaming knowledge and a direct relationship with all of the vendors. He's been on board for well over a year and we've been talking to the vendor community about the proposition for that length of time. They've helped us to build this. We've been asking for their input for over 12 months.

Yes, we have partnered with somebody. What I didn't want to do, as I saw another competitor do who started with nothing and then tried to build it, it took a long time. So we decided to have an offering on day one. Because it will take some time to build that proposition. We firmly believe that with our buying and selling prices, people will come to us rather than our competitors.

At the end of the day, gaming in an out-of-town space like this is unique to the UK but it's not unique to retail. In the US we all know about Best Buy, Target and Walmart etc. But even in Spain, France and so on you've got Media Markt, and they're very successful at selling games, CDs and DVDs from a big box retail park.

We're launching online in the autumn so we're still working through that process. But we will have gaming - it'll be an integral part of that site when it launches.

We do. Whether we'll launch it on day one is TBC. We've obviously got a lot on the music side - we've got a very strong relationship with Napster as we own them. But we are looking at the whole digital offering. We will launch digital but I can't say exactly when that'll be.

As far as I'm aware it's not something that we're currently looking at. But I don't think you can ever say never. We're looking to grow in this market space - the key for us is the get the right property.

I don't think it's a worry in the slightest. I think this is still a very very good market. The UK gaming market is still very strong and yes it might have had a difficult time over the last 12 months. I think with Move and Natal coming later this year, we've just had Splinter Cell and we've got some great products coming that I think will really change the face of gaming this autumn. So I'm really looking forward to seeing them at E3 to see how they've come on in the last 12 months and I think now is a great time to be entering the market.

And we're very keen to show what we can do. We think for a demonstration purpose the customers will come to us to see the products. At a friends and family event we held last weekend this area was one of the busiest areas in the store. We had kids playing, adults playing, we had the gaming room full and the comments that we received back were very very positive. The gaming area feedback was loud and clear - the customers we had in-store last weekend loved it.