Because they follow trends, it doesn't make it less of a sham or bad practice. It just shifts their bad decision and responsibilities on others. (I understand it was your reflection on reality, but it is not a valid reason to take away options from consumers.)
Well, I can understand your sentiment, as I, personally, miss the nicely boxed games from the 1990s and the ability to have physical disks to keep. (I do not miss the clutter at all.
)
But I also think it's easy to superimpose our personal "feelings" on a situation in such a way that our arguments over subjective concerns become unbalanced and unfair. The part I've quoted above pretty much targets the crux of why most distribution is becoming digital over physical copies.
1.) It's not a "trend" anymore -- it's the industry standard. And that's actually an extremely important consideration. Once something becomes a standard, that means that avenues for other methods of production literally vanish. Even if a company
wants to do something a certain way...that doesn't mean that they have the option. The services for such things are no longer available.
Point in case:
Let's highlight all of the industries that are required to produce a boxed copy of a game.
- DVD disk manufacturers to produce the actual blank DVDs and cases
- Label makers
- A suite of computers capable of burning hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of DVDs
- Printing companies to print the manuals, box art, etc.
- A warehouse with both the space and interest in storing / moving the product
- Shipping companies to transfer the product from warehouses to vendors
- Vendors with an interest in stocking such product on their shelves
When this stuff was in it's heyday, it was pretty expensive, but manageable. Now, one cannot really find a lot of industries that can do the above -- at least not in mass quantities anymore -- and what they can do has gotten much more expensive because...
there's no longer any demand.
2.) There needs to be a market for it. Remember that any form of physical production is also an investment. If I invest irresponsibly, I harm my business. Fact is, the demand for physical copies of games is extremely low. Most consumers much prefer the convenience of being able to download games from servers. Hence, if I spend the money making copies of the game, the majority will probably sit on store shelves or in my warehouses un-purchased...but I'll still need to pay for their upkeep. If I wind up throwing them away...you can see exactly why this is a concern. That's a lot of money to be wasting on something that there's not even reasonable demand for.
3.) Security. I worked for EB Games in the early 2000s. I was staff at the Prudential Center branch in downtown Boston, the flagship store in Massachusetts. Even as tiny as that place was, we had an
enormous amount of business, and our greatest deficit was "shrink". Meaning: stolen product. Believe it or not, stores even back then -- when printing boxed copies was mainstream business -- made almost no money on them. The expense of everything I list above was so great, that a new release at an average of $59.99 would net our store around...$5.00 in profits. That's how expensive it was to print, ship, and stock games under that system. We made almost all of our money in console sales, merchandise like toys and T-shirts and stuff, and used games and systems. And whenever someone stole a game, we'd need to spend around
$10.00 to defect the product out and send it back to the studio. If they even allowed that. I'd say we lost about 30% of all potential profit to theft.
Frankly, while the product was cool, the system sucked.
Now, we're in a different place. To simply call those concerns a "sham" is very far off the mark. Believe it or not, most businesses don't try to cheat their customers. It usually means customers get upset because they were cheated and don't contribute future business. But on the same token, you can't make everyone happy, either.
My recommendation to you is to write CDPR directly and ask for a copy of the PC version to be burned to disks. It's not a crazy request. Policy may not allow for it, but you never know until you ask!