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.

Seriously?  I just checked, and the save battery on my Pokemon Blue still works.  That is a lot older than GBA games.  I also checked Golden Sun and FF Tactics Advance to see if those were any different.  Save data is all there.

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!

It's going to depend on the game, and how much you played it. I shouldn't have said all of them, because I haven't played all of them. But the ones I've tried are probably my favorites, and therefore the ones I spend the most time playing, and would therefore be most likely to have a dead battery.

That's weird.  I probably have 400 or 500 hours on Pokemon Blue between the multiple playthroughs I did on that game.  I don't think I have anything near that long on any of my GBA games though.

They are possible to replace, but it is a pain in the ass.  I've never done it myself.

It partially just comes down to luck. One day though, your save batteries will all be dead. 

GBA save batteries can be replaced. You don't even need soldering skills because of how compact those carts are. A bit of doublesided tape will hold a new battery in place just fine.

It will be a big part of the future of the business, maybe even the majority part of it. I guess some good and bad will come with that.

So if I understand this correctly, a Person that buys their FIFA and Madden physically every single year and buys the nicest graphics card every year is more of a core gamer than a Person that plays a wide range of games on Game Pass and follows gaming news and culture?

This seems to not only be a arbitrary definition, but also a very useless one. I think most people would agree that people who mostly play their favorite sports teams on their PC don't belong in the category 'core gamer'. In general I think putting people into those categories does more harm than good. Being a 'core gamer' means nothing. A lot of 'core gamers' play those 'kiddy Nintendo games' and more COD players would fit into the 'casual gamers' category than Zelda players. Let's just stop putting people into arbitrary categories.

While I've rudely skipped reading 25+ pages, I will say that I think it depends on the end-user's needs.  Some people have very specific gaming preferences, and even further sprinkled with biases, so there really isn't a subscription service that will ever properly serve as a "catch all".  One man's trash is another man's treasure, as the saying goes.

Having said that, I recently signed up for Game Pass Ult for my video about criticizing Nintendo's port practices, and converted all remaining 18 months of my XBL Gold to Game Pass Ult for $1.  I'd say I got HELLUVA deal, yea?