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.
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.