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.
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.
Sure, but you say that like it’s a bad thing