A Quick question: How much money does not including a manual save? If Nintendo is still paying writers to write the manual and graphic designers to organize the manual, and re-uses concept art from the game's development, how much are they really saving per game? a couple of pennies?

I miss game manuals myself. What's replaced them are forced tutorials that in a lot of cases have been so bad that they've killed my interest in the actual game.

And as another poster said, how much money are they really saving by not having them?

The Witcher games come with very old style manuals and maps, TW I Platinum Edition even includes the game official guide on paper, it even beats many old games about this.

Game manuals are superior to ingame tutorials and often include great art, back story and relevant tips and tricks. I miss them!

Probably environmental issues.
Waste of paper/trees when 99% of people dont even open it up.

I dont even touch mine unless its supposed to have an online code on the back of it.

Kind of petty environmental issues, eh? And most gamers will crack a manual when it actually has good stuff and is not a shitty pamphlet.

petty?

Hundreds of millions of games are sold every year... thats a lot of paper/trees saved.

That's a piss-droplet in the septic tank compared to how much paper is sold at large, and in an industry that consumes quite a bit of natural resources and puts out a lot of waste otherwise. Yeah, that would constitute petty environmentalism and I highly doubt that's the reason they don't put out manuals anymore.

But the comparison to how much paper is sold at large is irrelevant.

If you compared everything like that, not a single environmentalky friendly activity would be worth it.

Anyway, theres been a massive drop in 'paper sold at large' over the past decade. Companies dont even give out paper bills anymore unless you ask for them and most companies which are not living in the 90's rarely print things. Then theres all the billion companies who reduced/changed their product packaging to appear eco friendly, even if they didnt want to. Then theres all the people buying e-books and reading their news on mobile compared to buying books and newspapers.

Countless number of examples where paper consumption has been reduced significantly.

Well, a couple of pennies saved per game x 1M games sold = a lot of money saved, and that is for one game.

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I also like the physical books because I can browse through them when I'm bored. Like books and ebooks, I like having a physical copy over digital.