Why physical media sucks
This is gonna be a post on r/unpopularopinions, but I need to hash it out some more.
Games coming on physical media sucks in 2020. Back in the early days of cartridges, it made sense. Those early cartridges also costed $15 just to produce, so the price of $50 was justified. Those games required 2-12 programmers to finish.
The era of CD's brought about pressing costs of less than a dollar, but software kept it's $50 price, with some titles beginning to cost $60 by the end of the 1990's. Keep inflation in mind, because at this point $60 is just about right. Meanwhile, development teams have ballooned to 20+ people.
Modern games still cost $60, and require hundreds of people to produce. Digital media virtually eliminates distribution costs, The earliest example of this is probably Nintendo's Famicom Disk System, where stations would re-write a disk with a new game for 500 yen, a total steal at the time [fact check this!]
My biggest problem with physical media games is saving them for later. I'll never know what I want to play a decade down the line, and saving an entire bookcase just to play one game is a waste of space, and borders on hoarding.
Most of the titles worth replaying get good ports later down the line on a more recent system, or get remasterd. Sure, sometimes the port or remaster is terrible, but in those cases there's usually a community that has the origional .exe or rom that'll work on modern systems or emulators.
In the modern age of digital media, I can always re-download the software I've purchaced. By the time those online services that allow me to re-download it are gone, I'll have long since abandoned the platform.