People want retail games and if the big 3 can’t cover that market a new and more sustainable subject will fill that space. Maybe it’s time to bring back physical media to PC, a more open system where publishers could make profit selling their retail games similarly to vinyls for music.
People still by cds and vinyls, I don’t think is fair to compare today with the apex of physical media, an adjustment in numbers is inevitable.
There’s a difference between “people still buy them” and “people still buy them enough to recoup the investment in producing them.”
Music studios have much larger budgets than indie game studios.
…Do they? There are a lot of small indie music labels producing vinyl, and there are indie game studios that can be quite large.
I built a desktop five years ago, and when I asked the Micro Center employee where the Blu Ray drives were, he looked at me like I had two heads, then pointed me to a sad little bin with loose drives with no boxes. People haven’t had disc drives for a long time. Games are also getting so big that you’d either need to require UHD discs (even I don’t have a drive for that) or multiple discs, and even back in the day, I hated multi disc installs.
Physical media on PC is as dead as it can get. I haven’t touched an optical medium in the last 15 years, and i don’t have a drive going on 10 years now. I also know of noone around me that is still using CDs/DVDs, the last time i messed with DVDs was when ripping every last one of them, and even my grandma has opted for converting her music to FLAC and freeing up the largish space her music Cds were using, making her collection both save from bitrot and a lot more readily available. I could get behind distribution per USB-Stick, but sticks that are fast enough to handle 100GB+ installations comfortably aren’t cheap in comparison to optical media, and in most cases it would only mean they are used for a single time when copying them to a network storage, in the end just creating tech waste.
DRM-Free installers - that’s where it’s at, and that is what i store; alternatively, for PS1/2 games, compressed CD images are the way to go.
Collectors Editions are the exception, but even here I would prefer the USB stick format if it had redundancy built in - nowadays that is the truly universal storage that any computer can use without needing extra hardware.
ETA: To make the issue clearer: If i had to use physical media to store my game collection alone, i would have to rent a storage room to have enough physical space to store around 45000 titles, and then add even more to have available room for a few thousand music albums. It would making sure all this data is save from the inevitable demise of optical media a fulltime job. This is fine for a museum, it is not fine for a person which has to pay rent per square meter.