Steam revitalized PC gaming after a rough patch in the mid-2000s, ending premature predictions that PC gaming was “dead.” It gave big publishers a way to protect their games from piracy, it gave independent developers a place to sell their products, and it gave gamers a convenient platform to manage their libraries. But by revolutionizing the way we play PC games, it made one thing certain: physical media have effectively been dead for PC gamers for over a decade.
Digital distribution is convenient, of course, but what if it wasn’t the only way to get your PC games? Could we finally get back to the glory days of big box gaming, where home computer entertainment was filled with a treasure chest of maps, manuals, and goodies? Would we be able to resell our old games? Should we actually install disk drives in our PCs? Would disk drives be the solution anyway? We’ll discuss the financial realities in a moment that make this all an unlikely dream, but for now let’s imagine the possibilities.
For those of you who weren’t gaming before the turn of the century, PC games came in giant boxes. Sometimes that box had nothing more than a game disc and a little installation guide, but often there was a lot more. Maxis’ classic simulations of cities, lands, and ants included textbook-sized textbooks, containing hundreds of pages devoted not only to information on how to play the game, but also science. from the real world that informed how these games were created. Cities: Skylines is already serving as an illustrative tool for modern city planning discussions – it could easily provide a variety of additional material on this topic as well.
It’s not just simulation games that have benefited from these big boxes. RPG games came with story guides, fabric maps, and what were often referred to as “feelings.” These were tokens and trinkets from the gaming world designed to extend the experience beyond your computer screen, helping you immerse yourself deeper into the world. You can change the waypoint markers from within Skyrim to get an older experience, sure, but what if you had to come across an actual map on your desktop to find your way to High Hrothgar? ? This kind of challenge isn’t for everyone, but we’ve lost that multi-format gaming experience in the modern age, even though RPGs like Baldur’s Gate 3 or Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous are getting closer than ever to sensibilities. old school. And because PC gaming boxes never had to adhere to the same standards as their console counterparts, there were some really crazy designs.
As fun as it is to imagine the Skyrim Cloth Map as a pack for the regular game rather than a bit of special edition merch, the most important thing in any game box is still the game itself – same. How would you distribute physical PC games in 2021? You can no longer count on most gaming PCs with disc drives, especially no Blu-ray drives, which would be essential for modern game sizes – just imagine trying to install the 200 GB from the latest Call of Duty from dozens of DVDs. And yes, we are fully aware of the potential environmental impact of reintroducing physical media. But downloads also come at an energy cost, and for big, big games that you might install two or three times over the years, that’s not necessarily better than buying them on a disc. The visible signs of waste may be gone, but our habit is far from clean.
just give us raw game installers on usb sticks
But there is another possibility: we could bring cartridges to PC games. Okay, yeah, maybe it tires you out having to blow into Fortnite to get it started, NES style, but it’s actually not that unrealistic. Media such as SD cards are cheap, plentiful, and fast, and similar types of flash media are used for gaming on Nintendo Switch. There’s no reason that similar technology couldn’t be used on a PC, and it would likely make installs a lot faster than they would be on the fastest online connections – great if you live in a city, but a big deal in rural America.
Looking at another console, the Xbox Series X, gives us an even more intriguing possibility. The Series X console has a proprietary SSD expansion slot that you can simply plug in new hard drives. The idea of paying the hundreds of dollars an SSD would cost just to get a single game is more than impractical, but what about collections? The entire Bethesda library on a small hard drive, priced at $ 199, with everything from Daggerfall to Skyrim and Starfield, ready to play on your PC anytime, no load times.
Or, remove the pretext altogether and just give us raw game installers on USB drives. Ultimately, this would be the perfect solution for consumers. You will receive a reusable, DRM-free installer on fairly reliable media that you can then either file for retention or reuse as you see fit.
But then ideas like “DRM-free” start to make us understand why major publishers would be so reluctant to make a user-friendly return to physical media. It’s hard to imagine EA releasing a version of FIFA that could immediately be ripped from flash media and posted directly to torrent sites. Even at the end of the original era of physical PC gaming, these packages were essentially CD keys in a box, tightly locked to specific online platforms or other DRM systems, without any of the real benefits of media. physical.
And – shock horror – you would be able to resell this games. This is the biggest practical benefit of physical media for most gamers. Your games would continue to hold some monetary value after you bought and played them, and given the current state of the retro gaming scene, that value could be much higher than the original purchase price. Even outside of the $ 1 million Mario auction, popular games from the 90s now often sell for similar prices to brand new games, or much more for rarer titles.
In recent years, consoles have also tended to be sold online, and this is popular with major publishers. As reported by GamesIndustry.biz, around 28% of the console games market in 2020 was made up of physical game sales – a significant slice of the pie, especially when you consider the impact of microtransactions on revenue. global.
PC gaming boxes never had to adhere to the same standards as their console counterparts, so there were some really wild designs.
Full game sales are more or less evenly split between digital and physical, even now. Take-Two said in its fiscal year 2020 that 45% of its game sales were physical. EA reported in 2020 that 48% of its console game unit sales were physical.
The point is that the big publishers want to continue to push digital sales, as margins are much better on online platforms, where there are no distribution channels to fear or physical goods to manufacture. And, if you’re already buying games from digital stores, publishers have a direct line to sell you DLC and in-game purchases. Retail PC games still exist – they make up about 2% of the PC market according to the GI.biz report – but for the most part they still suffer from this “cd key in a box” problem.
But there is still hope for physical PC games. Store publishers like Limited Run Games have carved out a niche for themselves selling physical editions of games that would otherwise be digital-only on consoles, and more than a few indie games and retro re-releases have also sprung up on PC discs. Super Rare Games’ new Mixtape goes the extra mile to curate a selection of small indie games that might otherwise go unnoticed, bringing them together in a single package for collectors.
The small print runs these small publishers need to make ends meet mean these versions will never become as ubiquitous as physical media enthusiasts might want, but they at least serve as a window to a world where there is still life. in physical games. on PC. While the digital future is already the digital present on computers, and it’s damn convenient, let’s not forget the possibilities we gave up to get there.
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