this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2023
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I don't think you understand economies of scale. It doesn't make sense for me to pay retail price for a single unit, especially if I have no other use for it. These costs are trivial at scale, and would also hopefully provide some impetus to optimise the code and texture storage.
Economies of scale aren't magic. Games are somewhat resistant to price increases in the face of inflation because we've shifted to digital distribution that you're looking to erode with the suggestion of shipping with physical media again, and you'd still have to pay well more than half of the price it would take you to buy that same media on Amazon. The storage size has grown because they've been optimizing for other factors, and I'm sure they came to the conclusion that it's more likely you'll free up space or buy storage expansions in the future after a price drop than it is that you would buy a game that ran worse or looked worse forever because they optimized more for storage space.
I am happy to pay whatever extra it costs to have the experience of actually owning a game on a lasting medium with some artwork. My experience with digital downloads is that I just never care as much. Often I won't even finish the game unless it is beyond amazing. I like to receive tangible things for my hard earned money I guess.
Flash drives are not a lasting medium. You'd need something like a quad-layer blu-ray, which is not cheap and has slow read speeds compared to solid state storage. Also nobody has blu-ray readers anymore. Also blu-ray publishers are tiny. Also the expense of distributing physical media.
So we've arrived back at the beginning - you can have this cake and eat it too, but you're going to have to eat the expense yourself. Imposing it upon the entire consumer market is selfish and wasteful.