Love manuals for their smell, usefulness and collector's value. Strategy guides give you that same manual feel, only on steroids...

This, as much as I loved reading Sonic/Mario/Any other manual they were only good to read once or twice and that was it, the bigger onces actually added more weight to the box which annoyed me, also the WoW manual is stupidly long in pages that even back in 2004 I never finished reading it.

That said online manuals aren't exactly much to read either and some in-game tutorials can still be a bit annoying, some are fun though.

I don't miss them , for the most part. Some were very well done with older games, though.

To be perfectly honest, the times when we really needed game manuals are gone! Still, that AlltP manual makes me smile!

Two reasons:

Cost
People don't read them/Internet/Youtube

Now me being an old school gamer, some of the game manuals of old were glorious, X-Com terror from the deep having two awesome manuals.

PS - the other thing is that PC manuals used to be good, but as the PC retail market is now dead for box products, whats the point :(

I did love reading through them, and yes the new game smell was one of the thing we all enjoyed. Though I do like that instructions are-in game. Personally, when I buy the game, I want to play right away and am just too lazy to read the instructions in a booklet (I'm more of a visual learner anyway). On the plus side it saves trees too

I liked manuals until in-game menus started doing a better job.

The smell is the best part.

I agree. It also feels extremely cheap to open the box just to get a little cartdrige or a disc.

When i'm paying a premium price i would expect a premium package, but thats the industry today.

I loved the old game manuals, with custom artworks. They looked awesome. A decent amount of 7th gen games actually had them, but most 8th gen titles come only with a DLC voucher.

I would prefer if PS4/X1 games had full digital manuals like Vita games included with the disc/card.