Anyone have insights on how physical copies totally died out on the PC market, but are still going strong on Console? I remember buying civ 5 on physical disc back in middle school, and even then the guy at GameStop was all surprised to be selling a hard copy of a PC game.all this time later, and you can still buy pretty much Amy major game on hard disc for consoles. Why?
My personal theory is that different game publishers wanted to push their own digital storefront, but that only works for PCs. Valve was able to release Steam on PC, but I can’t imagine it’ll ever make its way to PlayStation or Xbox.
I think what happened is a lot of PC games started becoming blank disks with install software for the publisher’s storefront with a download code for the game. Then eventually when everyone had the storefront installed, they no longer had to ship anything.
This is not feasible for console since no additional storefronts (beyond Sony’s and Microsoft’s) will likely ever be allowed.
So while it saves a bit of money to ship a download code in a box, it doesn’t actually net them the benefit of getting you on the publisher’s ecosystem; so it usually isn’t worth the bad publicity to not ship a disk.
On a personal note, I love owning things physically. If the market ever moved fully to digital purchases only, I’d likely become a “retro” gamer exclusively.