Conina said:
Do you really think that publishers wouldn't have reduced extras anyways over the years without digital distribution of games? The days of reference cards/handbooks explaining the gameplay and controls were numbered when tutorial got easy to implement, showing the players directly on the screen what to do (and in some genres it got even self-explanatory). The days of booklets telling the story / some context were numbered when most players expected intro movies and cutscenes in the game. The days of printed maps were numbered when when onscreen maps got easy to implement. Advertisement flyers for hint books died together with the hint books the moment you could get strategy guides for free in the internet. |
True, but digital gave it a big push. Remember file sizes had to be small when digital games started to become a thing, and parity with the physical version was preferred. So much so that any benefits from loading from disc in parallel to loading from HDD were only used in very few titles. Halo was one of them that ran better from disc using hdd install compared to fully copied onto HDD.
The decline of items in the box was also helped along by digital distribution. And of course the margins, digital has much better margins, no need to increase prices along with inflation. However the physical version had to become more and more bare bones to cover the cost.
Without digital distribution, prices would have either gone up sooner or budgets wouldn't have grown out of control so much, with more emphasis on gameplay instead of the shiniest graphics. Kinda sounds like Nintendo. Maybe it's time to make the switch!
