Do you purchase used games? Well, if you do, you're hurting or helping the video game industry, maybe. No one's really sure. Either way, however, for a practice that's maligned by so many gamers, a startling number of them do it anyway. How many, exactly? Try 49 million -- and that's only in the U.S. The MI6 game marketing conference in San Francisco recently presented the results of a study which found that little tidbit, along with many more.

For instance, a whopping 60% of gamers buy a mix of used and new games, with a mere 28% opting for the new and shiny. Meanwhile, a pithy 3% purchase used games exclusively, and Gamestop loves them dearly -- but not enough to instate a program which would shield them from the slings and utterances of "Are you sure you don't want to reserve anything" of outrageous employees.

And it appears used games will only continue to be the cool kid on the block, as the U.S. economy's continuing downfall makes buying used an appealing proposition. One in four consumers without prior experience purchasing a used game will change their ways this year, and 78% of used game buyers said they'd stay their miserly course.

To offset this apparent used game fever, there exists a class of gamer which MI6 dubbed the "New Game Glutton." Possessing surprisingly trim, sparse game collections, these gamers purchase new games on day one, beat them with incredible speed, and then resell them at the peak of their value. These lightning-quick consumers generate roughly 5% -- or $415 million -- of the $8.6 billion video game market.

Moving from "who" to "when," MI6 discovered that sales of new games nose-dive after a month on shelves. In fact, 27% of a new game's sales are made within the first week.