I understand people's reaction to there being no physical install discs. Up until two years ago, my Internet connection was a 4g mobile connection that had a 14gb monthly cap. It is not a pleasant prospect having to download a game of this size on such a limited connection.

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It's not even discs that are the issue. Even though the Blu-ray patents are expired and thus it should cost pennies to produce one or two discs, it's entirely possible that a game could be distributed on something like a cheap USB drive, which shouldn't cost more than a couple of dollars if sourced in bulk at wholesale.

I think that the real issue is that the AAA industry doesn't want to have to commit a game to a physical medium. It wants to be able to start selling a game whether its finished or not. It wants to be able to issue fifteen patches over as many months in order to get a game to version 0.87 (While calling it v1.34).

I don't think it is an issue of cost, or of the number of people worldwide who would benefit. The way that the AAA industry wants to do things--the way the majority of customers have short-sightedly allowed it to do things--makes physical distribution essentially pointless.

Blu-Ray didn't get wide adoption because USB flash drives and SD cards caught up really fast in sizes and they are silent and fast. There were a few atempts on making reliable optical holographic media which made sense with disc sizes of several terabytes but none managed to get drive costs low enough to be commercially feasible.

So, when game installer files are about 70-100Gb what kind of media you can ship as physical copy? 128Gb USB stick? 128Gb external SSD? Those will easily *double* the cost of a physical release but also if you'll keep your game in the box for 30 years without using that drive much after first installation you can end with it having corrupted filesystem (some types of flash memory can lose data if left unpowered for waaay too long). External mechanical HDD? Okay, a little cheaper but still costly and more likely to get DOA in transit. A ROM drive? While those can be more reliable than optical media but sadly large ROM chips aren't much cheaper than flash chips. If not more expensive.

On other hand no one prevents you from copying that installer to your drive and put it into the game box and even making fresh backups from time to time.

In a bit more of an ideal world a 100/128GB Blu-Ray disc ;) Of course for various reasons BD didn't see enough of a push on PC (while continuing to be the standard for console game physical distribution) and so we've been increasingly stuck with DVDs containing a sliver of the game install on them and a code or just the latter sans-disc entirely---at which point why even bother with physical media for PC releases.

The way I've always seen it is publishers could have said, 'look, either we continue to release physical for PC sans actual content or those who care about having the game in-hand buy an external BD reader'. Even producing higher capacity BD is cheaper (from impressions I gather) than producing USB sticks and they're durable.

This type of thing is communicated to consumers everywhere else: want x new hardware? Only compatible on Windows 10 so you'll have to upgrade. Want to enjoy Ultra HD films on Blu-Ray? You'll have to upgrade your player and optionally buy a HDR screen. Want the latest version of an app and your phone is too old? You'll have to upgrade it.

For everything else consumers just accept and even expect having to upgrade things over time for the latest content but for whatever reason for PC game physical distribution the argument shifts to be: 'welp, guess an incomplete DVD/game code it is'.

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I'm afraid you are mistaken. First, USB sticks and SD cards were a different market than optical discs, serving an entirely different function. Since the CD-ROM, the overwhelming majority of PC gamers did not buy optical drives for data storage--they bought them so that they could install and play games and other software.

The reason hardly any gamers bought Blu-ray drives is that no games were released on Blu-ray. That is the only reason I never bought a Blu-ray drive. This is primarily due to the Great Consolization of 2008.

Because all major AAA releases from 2008 onward have been console games--designed for console HW, console controllers, and the tastes and sensibilities of the console gamer--the installation size of most PC versions/ports remained below 20GB until the current gen consoles were released at the end of 2013. Notable exceptions include RAGE (25GB), Max Payne 3 (35GB), and BioShock: Infinite (30GB).

So when PC versions/ports suddenly increased significantly in size and PC Blu-ray distribution made sense, there was no installed base of PC Blu-ray drives. On top of this, the now wholly console-centric AAA industry's desire that the PC gaming market would hurry up and die, as well as the desire for total control over the gaming experience, led the "publishers"** to push Web-based distribution for PC.

At no point did the existence of flash memory have anything to do with the failure of developers to distribute via Blu-ray to the PC market.

** The sarcasm quotes reflect the fact that by this time, these companies were increasingly no longer actually publishing games in the PC market, but rather developing and electronically distributing them.

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You seem to contradict yourself, as you argue that Blu-ray was never originally adopted because flash memory caught up in size, but then you argue that USB sticks--even now--are way too expensive as a means of distributing games.

Now, regarding a physical release, I'm not sure if you did indeed mean a doubling of cost, or if you meant price. But for argument's sake (not that the industry has any desire to do this), a cheap 128GB USB 2.0 stick--which is all that is necessary for the distribution of a game--could be sourced in bulk amounts for a wholesale price of a few dollars at maximum. Not only would this put only the smallest dent in the massive profit margin of the average AAA game, but if push came to shove, I'm sure that many people wouldn't object to paying an extra $2 or 3 USD for a full physical copy of a game, when their other option is to download 100GB+ over a sub-10 Megabit connection, and perhaps have the extra complication of data caps.

The cost of preparing and shipping a USB stick such as this could not possibly be more than the cost of physical releases used to be: The cost of the disc(s) was quite small, but then there was the cost of preparing and printing a manual, a map, the design and manufacture of the box, and the shipping and warehousing costs of a product significantly larger than a USB stick.

I'm only arguing that cost wouldn't be an impediment. I'm not advocating for flash memory distribution, as optical discs make much more sense. Unfortunately, the reasons for Web-based distribution ultimately have nothing to do with what is best for video games or video gamers.

Non-gamers or people who use their PCs not only for games used DVD-RW drives to make backups, write custom discs for hardware players etc. At the time BD-R drives arrived prices for USB flash sticks were going down and sizes were growing fast. Right now a 25Gb BD-R disc is only a half of the price of 32Gb USB stick which isn't read-only and got faster random read/write access speeds.

So BD-R and even BD-ROM drives never became a common thing. That with digital distribution taking over pretty much killed physical releases on PCs.
For USB sticks - the bulk price for the cheapest, garbage quality 128Gb stick that just works is about $4. The bulk price for a pressed CD, DVD or BD is a few cents. The bigger the batch the cheaper they are. Cheapest retail CD-R disk is probably 3-4 times more expensive than pressed bluray disk with all the prints and stuff if it's a batch of 10000 or more. So yeah USB sticks are waaaay more expensive than shiny plastic round things.

I totally understand the "pleasure" of downloading 70+ Gb game on <10Mbit/s internet. But the pnly edition where it will be feasible for a company to add physical media will be some expensive collector's edition. Where adding 15 bucks on top of that price won't change much.