No, physical media is not useful for PC games, you want a DRM free installer (preferably with all relevant patches applied, both game patches and compatibility DLL/mods for older games), not the physical media (which may or may not have DRM).

This ship has sailed a long time ago on PC (~15 years ago).

It's not the disc itself that people care about, it's having a transferrable license. People want the option to rent games, or give them away/resell after playing. Physical media provides some legal protections for that because you are buying a license attached to the thing storing the software.

Digital distribution is a perfectly fine way to get a game, if it weren't synonymous with big companies taking away your ownership of the right to use software you purchased. You can't share a game you enjoyed with friends. If you lose access to your account you're SOL. If the host server shutsdown, you better have had a stable copy installed/backed up.

People don't hate digital downloads, they hate the consumer abuse they have enabled. Stop the consumer abuse, and only collectors will care about physical media.

I'm like the only one I know with an optical drive in my computer and its not even a bluray drive. Maybe if they distributed on like USB drives? but that seems expensive

I would honestly be more interested in a hard push for GOG, itch, and other similar DRM-free marketplaces.

The whole point of PC is digital data though.

The original DOOM was shareware, you were allowed to copy and share it with your friends or online however you wanted because it promoted and popularized the game.

CDs on PC were always just a retail medium. Unlike classic consoles, there are very few PC games that run right off the disk. It was usually an installer.

I know people complain about Steam all the time with "you don't actually own your games" but you do own your PC and the filesystem which means you can copy that data and do whatever you want with it. No EULA on earth is going to stop you.

Of course if it ships with DRM or relies on steam to launch, then yeah that's lock in, but that's where GOG and pirate repacks fill the space.

It was inevitable for consoles to go full digital because 90% of sales are digital and it gets the inherent convenience of digital media, but consoles don't let you access the filesystem and do whatever you want. It's a locked down system with a metric ton of security to prevent you from ever copying the game data.

Retail will also always reduce profit, especially for smaller developers who need to rely on a publisher to sell on their behalf.

Steam and GOG take a 30% cut, so it's probably better to promote itch.io or some other platform if that's a concern.

Personally, so long as it's DRM-free, physical, installers or zipped files sound like a good idea.

And like with vinyl, if it comes back, it's to be expected that it isn't as big as it once was. But being there, it's another option for the preservation and ownership folks.

No, it's not beneficial. The difference between consoles and PCs is that PCs have an open infrastructure, which lets you back up your data to any medium or service you want.

For example, if Steam goes out of business and doesn't release the DRMs, they will easily be cracked. You cannot say the same for consoles.

What I'd like to see is good selling indie games doing a "limited edition" or "supporter edition" 6 months to a year after they launch. Have it be a physical box, with an SD card or Blu-Ray with custom art, plus various bits of merchandise.

Essentially, get them to make pre-order or limited editions after the game already launched and garnered goodwill instead of trying to front load all the greed.

I'd definitely buy copies if games like "Sea of Stars" or "Ori and the Blind Forest" did this

we need offline, drm-free installers and games that are not tied to the storefront you bought them in

physical versions could be offered for those, i think it would be cool! but it’s not necessary imo. as long as it’s preservable and transferable, it’s good.

I'm all for people having discs if they want them but, man, I do not want that shit cluttering up my life.

We have physical media on PCs, we even still have full control of them and can copy and modify anything we want.

Now you mean we should be buying some kind of disk which will actually offer us no more control and in fact was historically used for DRM.

Adding physical distribution overhead will definitely not help publishers (especially small ones or indie Devs) turn a profit.

Vinyl is horrible for consumers. CD was a format we eventually could use ourselves to copy and mix music to our preference.

While this would be great, we'd have to stockpile on said media which is less convenient. Discs were great but they'd always get lost somewhere and/or used a lot of space when stacked.

I'd personally prefer to download the files on a hard drive which could hold thousands of games while saving space. Only problem being that these games would need to be transferred to an SSD for better read/writing speeds. On the other hand discs would only need to be plugged into a disc slot which may or may not seem very convenient considering how most laptops/PCs don't have those, meaning we'd need to buy these extra.

Either way having pretty discs with collectibles like in the good old days seems like a good idea if you're into that sort of things.

Also, I have a pet peeve:

I see a lot of people claim to want discs, but they haven’t actually used them given the choice.

Or buy DRM free. And they don’t.

For what it’s worth, I try to buy games from GoG first, first party storefront second, but that hardly even works anymore. It’s almost always only available on Steam. Maybe rarely on EGS or something, but then it’s not clear if the download is even DRM free, and it literally cannot be cheaper if it’s listed on Steam too, so that’s not really an option.

Physical releases cost a fair bit to make, from just printing the media and designing the package and so on. And then there's storing and shipping the game around the world so people could actually buy it.

Shipping could be out sourced to the customer easily enough (some kind of direct to customer sales model), but the rest is still a good chunk of extra cost for the publisher. Manufacturing like this also typically has to be paid in advance, so harder for smaller publishers and Indies to get it done in the first place.

I don't think we will see a comeback of physical releases for PC other than as a collector items, it just doesn't make sense for normal releases at this point.

Most laptops don't have an optical drive any more. I haven't looked at desktops.

You can obviously buy an external USB one, or sell things on USB thumb drives, but...

Audio optical media sales peaked a long time back and have massively declined since then.

https://www.statista.com/chart/12950/cd-sales-in-the-us/

Quarter-century back that they peaked.

Successor physical audio formats haven't caught on.

If they are DRM free so they could be resold or shared/traded then I'm on board. The only two problems I have with digital shit is you cannot share/lend/resell it and, if you're not in control of storing it, there's no guarantee it will always be available after purchase.

Nah. The hardware for making discs is aging, and not developed anymore. USB/SD cards are too expensive.

And digital key reselling? That’s a whole can of worms for grifters to squeeze.

Not that it doesn’t suck. I want to (legally) archive and resell my games.

…But I don’t know a good alternative.

I never want to go back to physical media