Imagine you’re a potential customer of a particular car dealership. Imagine this dealership has a very special offer, just for you. If you promise to purchase an upcoming model and place money down now, they’ll include — get this: power locks.

So, not only are you getting a “special” feature that should be standard to everyone, but you’ve committed yourself to this product before any kind of safety reviews, product testing and so on.

At this point, you might think to yourself, “Hey, I can just wait until the car comes out, and then I’ll buy a model with power locks.” Not so. Turns out, there are no plans to give the average consumer power locks. No, you have to commit to this unknown model right now.

All right, stop imagining. It’s a ridiculous scenario, right? This would never happen in real life.

Oh, if only that were true. But unfortunately, this unfair business practice now permeates the video game industry.

You may be thinking that this has been going on for some time, and that’s true. But until now, the metaphorical power lock — so to speak — was swag: posters, miniature figurines, in-game costumes and the like. Now, it’s content.

In the recent PS3-exclusive inFAMOUS, a pre-order through GameStop netted players a nifty superpower that was and still is unavailable to those who pre-ordered their copies from another store, purchased the game after release or chose to rent before buying. Plenty of other games are guilty of reserving content for pre-orders, like the upcoming Batman: Arkham Asylum, which only allows pre-ordered copies of the game to face one of the Dark Knight’s most famous enemies, The Scarecrow.

This isn’t giving pre-order-purchasing customers more, it’s robbing everyone else.

It’s a practice that ends up short-changing the consumer and sucks players into the inescapable vortex that is GameStop’s money machine, which, according to a February finance statement, the company hopes to see grow by 10-12 percent – from $8.8 billion in fiscal year 2008 to $9.68-9.85 billion in 2009.

For those who have never worked at GameStop, allow me to explain the cycle of this market manipulation. Pre-orders, along with used game sales and subscriptions to Game Informer magazine, give employees good reviews and the keeping of one’s job — along with consideration for promotion — is largely based on how well the employee is able to hype up products that aren’t even out yet. Of course, there’s no incentive to get customers to reserve quality products, as any pre-order is just as good as the next on employee evaluations.

And you might think only a small number of customers are willing to risk $60 on an unknown product before test-driving it themselves or reading a review. But, just look at all these spiffy things you get for pre-ordering!

When the game comes out, owners will almost undoubtedly trade their game back to GameStop. The company takes the game in, trading it for, usually, about 30 percent of its market value in in-store credit. It then recycles the title and places it on the shelves, selling it for — again — usually about 80 to 90 percent value.

Sound like an equal value trade to you? Keep in mind that since players trade in old games for in-store credit, GameStop isn’t actually ever really losing money. Couple this with the fact that publishing and development companies don’t make any money from used game sales, and you have two very bad things leading to a rapid monopolization of the gaming industry.

Publishing and development teams aren’t really to blame here. It’s hard to ignore the success that used game specialty stores have, and with industry giants like Midway sinking into bankruptcy, many companies are so desperate for money they’d easily choose to strike a deal for pre-order bonuses that rob the majority of the gaming public.

And why shouldn’t they? After all, those pre-orders are supposedly guaranteed sales that translate into profit for the publishing and development teams.

It’s time gamers demand fair play. Support producers and developers by buying console games new, and with PC games, look to sources that require no physical copy at all — Direct2Drive and Steam, for example.

In return, the gaming industry will flourish, bolstered by confidence that it doesn’t need to rely on GameStop or similar stores for sales. A new kind of competition will lead to more quality titles and original intellectual properties. Maybe then we will all begin to remember why we got into this hobby in the first place: Because we love it.