The two key reasons why I buy on GOG are :
- I want to own my games. I want to be able to continue use them without depending on an online service, using an offline installer.
- The ease of use, I don't need to login to a service to play the game.

We should take that further and be able to buy nice collector edition big boxes like we had in the past, containing a USB key with the game files already uncompressed and ready for play. So you would have that cool big cardboard box, and inside it a USB key, and whenever you fancy playing that game, you just plug the USB key in your computer and play. No complicated installation needed, the game would be pre patched and possibly even pre-modded. On inserting the key in your computer, you would have a launcher that lets you either launch the original version or add graphics mods or even gameplay mods with just checkboxes. There would also be a cool printed manual of the game in the box so that you could look at the manual while playing, or even take that manual on the bus to study it and think about strategies.

I've started collecting Steelbook Blu-Rays and I just like the idea that I have a nice object on the shelf and when I fancy it, I just need to put the disc in the drive and be entertained.

Optical discs are obsolete nowadays, but we could have USB keys with the game files already unpacked and ready to use. In terms of performance, for older games I think even a low end modern USB key would be faster than the hard drives of the 90s and early 2000s. The USB key should be made with a cool design that relates to the game. It should have in it duplicate game files for all the platforms supported (mac, windows, linux, etc). The USB key's contents could be patched if needed with GOG Galaxy.

Especially with USB4 / Thunderbolt 5 around the corner, the bandwidth of USB should be more than enough to play directly from the drive. For maximum performance or for games that require a lot of data, I can imagine having an nvme ssd in an enclosure connected through thunderbolt or high-speed USB.

I'd be rebuying my favorite games if such an easy-to-use physical format was made available. Maybe start with a very popular title like heroes 3, with low performance requirements, and go from there ?

As long as it is not done by GOG (they need to focus more, not less), I see no reason to be against that. My feeling is that such a store would not manage to find enough customers to stay afloat, but I would be happy to be proven wrong.

Obviously I would not be a customer, for four main reasons:
- Many of the games I play still get regular updates, so the content of the USB stick would quickly be obsolete;
- I don’t have the room to physically store all the games I own (very far from it);
- I find that the lack of a dedicated physical medium for each game is an improvement over the CD-ROM era;
- Shipping physical goods has a big ecological and economical cost, that I am not willing to pay when I can avoid it.

We had threads like this in the past already.
I'll tell you, what I told others in those cases:

GOG can't just produce physical editions of the games which they are allowed to sell.

Only the owners of the IPs can do that.

GOG could only sell such physical editions, if these companies would produce them first and then allow GOG to sell them.

Then, and ONLY then, could GOG sell those physical editions...IF GOG wasn't a pure digital downloads store, that is.

There's a lot more logistics (storage, shipping, etc) involved in selling physical goods, than in selling digital zeros and ones.

So - nope. It will never happen. Not here, anyway.

Why ask the company to do this when you can have it with your closest friend? (question mark just for decoration)

You cooked it already, gave us the recipe, and want to store it in style. Your old gonna be like new.

1. buy yourself a micro SDXC card with the mandatory original card-> USB adapter and micro->normal adapter

2. hoover your SD card slot and use it as a disk formatted to NTSF with an 8kb cluster for a 1 TB card, and a 4kb cluster for anything smaller like 256 GB, or use your card through the original USB 3.0 adapter

3 you can keep your installers on a micro SDXC card

4 can you install games and play on-from card? Yes! And it will be awkward and hard to install anything on a standard HDD after switching to a card

5 this micro 256 or 1tb card can be worn inside of a magic ring or amulet and you can take it with you to play with your friend

256gb sdxc card
1Tb sdxc card
mp3 player or mobile : )

Now....boxes.... cornflakes boxes! Ideal size. With printed screens and covers. Inside? postcard with sd card(empty, formated) and..... GOG's code for a game! ....plus.... printed instruction and personalized gift card. Sweet! 🍩
you are a Wizard! ^° : D

Points at my lack of an optical media drive and lack of space to keep/display big boxes.

1) This didn't stop anyone during the physical media era from putting in a callback/dial home/other annoying methodology. And before the internet was ubiquitous, some of them would have done so, had they the means to. See also: Physical hardware dongles. Because you wanted to use that User Port for your second joystick and not some useless authenticator that barely works, right⸮

2) Again, nothing stopped physical media titles from pulling this stunt, even if it was in the form of trying to get you to fill a registration card. Especially if your game involved multiplayer of some kind. Hope you had a Gamespy account[!]

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1) And how would you praytell, keep this USB key updated, prevent it from being overwritten, or worse, damaged? This also feels like it'd be a waste of a medium, given how small many of the games would be compared to the Minimal Viable Product for mass production vs the maximum size, which uhhh, rapidly approaches a terabyte, especially with mods.
1a) GOG's installers are a lot of things of which I would happily deride. Complicated isn't one of them.
1b) And who determines these graphical mods, especially when it comes to things like Dosbox games? I've seen a lot of enthusiasts do scanline mods, and lemme tell ya: Most of em are butt ugly; being based on the image of a CRT screen that's been running 8+ hours a day in an arcade.
1c) And praytell, where is GOG supposed to source the manual of a game that never came with one, or whose manual has become lost to time?

2) Neat, you have a shiny box, and less space for actual mementos or meaningful things.

3) Which I will helpfully point out, doesn't exist for Linux. And if it doesn't have duplicate files, then one supposed Dosbox using games would only have a symlink to the user's installation of Dosbox Staging/X/other modern flavor.

4) You forgot about this pesky thing called heat dissipation. (& thermal throttling) And more to the point, given most of the games I'd be thinking of would be so small as to waste the entire bandwidth/throughput, pointless to force everyone to upgrade to a new computer just to take advantage of a bandwidth space already plenty spacious.

5) Or maybe the game is popular because you don't need to swap disks or handle the media⸮ HOMM came on a myriad of disks when it was physical, and even the Complete Edition came with two disks.

It's like those damned tech bros, trying to reinvent the train, but worse.

Why Big PC Game Boxes Disappeared [LGR Tech Tales]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9EOrJ9eWiU

Interesting replies guys. Let me address some of the issues raised and continue the brainstorming:

- For the physical space problem, obviously you wouldn't want to do that for all your games, just for a select few that you really like. Just like you wouldn't buy 4K Blu Rays for all your movies, and you would not get vinyls for all your music, just for the masterpieces you really enjoyed.

- For updates, unlike retail optical disks, USB keys are not read-only. It would be trivial to apply a patch to it. Ideally GOG Galaxy would handle the updates when needed. But for sure this is mainly intended for games that have been out for a couple years, and already have all DLCs and patches released.

- Is Micro SDXC fast enough for such a usage ? I was thinking USB because it has gotten faster.

- For the physical box production, I think it could be structured as an on-demand printing service. The producer (GOG or someone else) would have a website where you can print what you want on a cardboard box, and you could happen to pick the exact images displayed on the old big box covers. It would be quite pricey because of the very limited production runs. Though it could also be structured as a Massdrop pooled purchase where production would happen if 100 people agreed to purchase a box. If GOG does not want to do it, it could be a niche Etsy style boutique business. To be fair, at the moment it might be cheaper for some games to buy an original big box from ebay.

- The physical big box is the icing on the cake, but the main thing here is to have some plug and play USB drives for games. I don't have a lot of time to play games, so I want to minimize the time required to set it up and maximize the time available for play. The problem here is that from what I understand, games need to write to windows registry before being able to run. So ideally there would be an autoplay script on inserting the USB key which checks if the game is installed. If it is not installed, write the necessary items to the registry and install the required directX versions. Then run the game from the USB. Also pre-configure to save the game saves to the USB drive itself, so that you can plug the key in a different computer and continue your game.

- The mods thing is also a nice to have, but for example for skyrim I spent a lot of time modding it, it would be faster if I had a USB key or an external nvme SSD with skyrim pre-installed and pre-modded for example with the Phoenix Flavor modlist, and could just play whenever I feel like it, and not spend 2 days on a new install. It would have to be optional so that you can play the original version if you want and enable/disable mods on launch with checkboxes.

Whenever I have some time, which means probably never, I would like to experiment with reverse engineering the GOG installer to create such a plug and play USB key, and maybe post findings on a GitHub repo.

@OP - As much as it might seem nice to some like yourself, it would definitely not be a good business model.

You are also talking about an overhead that would be significant.

GOG, it seems, can't keep up with things now.

And there are hardware considerations. Data needs to be accessed fairly quickly for most games, and a thumbstick drive simply wouldn't cut it in most cases. USB sticks also don't tend to have a long life in my experience. They'd maybe be alright to install from, if rather slow, but you wouldn't want to play a game from them.

And despite GOG being pro DRM-Free, that are not backwards, and returning to discs and boxes, is certainly backwards.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IndieBox

Quote:
"Working directly with the indie game developers, IndieBox designs and manufactures boxed collector's edition physical releases of games that are typically only available in digital form.

The company started operations in May 2014.

Included in every monthly box is
- a digital rights management-free (DRM-free) game disc (custom-designed rewritable USB-stick for most boxes released before July 2016),
- Steam key,
- full-color printed instruction game manual,
- game soundtrack CD,
- sticker, and
- an exclusive collectible, such as a plushy or action figure of a notable character from that game.

All games are packaged in a physical game box similar to software titles in the 1980s and 1990s."

and

"In October 2017, IndieBox announced it was closing down its subscription product.

The company cited that the market for physical box releases was not as large as they had anticipated to cover all costs of preparing the boxes for subscribers."

Now - was this a "monthly subscription service"? Aka: not really what you are talking about?
Yes...but: I'm pretty sure, the market doesn't get much bigger, for "games on USB sticks in physical boxes" if you cut out the monthly subscription.
As the replies so far probably prove already.

-----------------------------------

As for "the main thing here is to have some plug-and-play USB drives for games":
nobody is keeping you from putting all your games on USB drives.

And whether you want to put those USB drives inside a nice and shiny big box is also completely up to you.
Empty boxes, USB sticks and color-printers are available for (relatively) little money.

Edit: fixed some typos

I've done a little bit of research on "SSDs in a stick" USB keys.

These are USB drives that actually contain an SSD. At the moment, the main contenders seem to be the Kingston Data Traveler Max, the Transcednd ESD310C, and the OWC Envoy Pro Mini. All these provide decent performance and should be adequate for gaming.

The issue is that the lowest capacity is 256 GB, which is much larger than most games need, and it is unclear if the advertised performance is for the larger drives only or also applicable to smaller capacity drives.

To not waste capacity, it would be possible to install multiple games on a drive, however in this case you can't have a game-specific design for a drive. Also these drives don't seem to offer simple customization options to differentiate them from each other if you buy a bunch of them to have one per game.
Maybe I could etch the game's title logo on the OWC Envoy Pro Mini's aluminium casing, to have a visual cue as to which game it is storing. For a plastic enclosed key, some kind of sticker would work.

At the moment the drives are USB 3 gen 2, but it is likely that in the coming years they will support Thunderbolt 5 / USB 4, and be even faster and more compact.

The hardware feasibility aspect being solved, the software side needs to be solved. What would be great is if GOG would provide a "make bootable USB" option from GOG Galaxy for each game, like windows does, to format and prepare a USB key to store a game.

I ignored the mention of GOG Galaxy in your first message, because at the time I did not understand it would be a central piece of your model.

You understand that what you are asking for here is the addition of a DRM system (GOG Galaxy) that would gate the access to game updates? I doubt it would have much success in the target demographics of players who want to store boxed version of games. Unless such boxes are only for display, but then why bother with including a copy of the game in it at all?

Optical media is not dead yet:
https://www.livescience.com/technology/electronics/new-petabit-scale-optical-disc-can-store-as-much-information-as-15000-dvds

If physical were to make a return, I'd honestly just prefer discs. IMO, the only reason Blu-Rays nevet caught on for games was the prevalence of Steam. But capacity was never really a problem. We had games on X CDs/DVDs in the past, same could have been done with Blu-Ray. But the main reason physical is unlikely to make a large scale return is updates. People got too comfortable getting everything auto-updated without moving a finger. Can't imagine the masses going back to the glory days of manual patching.

Prabably not as elegant but way cheaper, you can use SSD's with a external USB enclosure. There are many options and 128GB SSD's are pretty cheap, you can probably buy smaller units too.
That said, USB drives speeds are more than acceptable for most games, decent ones are probably faster than the middle-of-the-road Hard Drives computers had not long ago. (Edit: many low-end machines are still using EMMC drives wich is not much faster than decent USB drives. Steam Deck 64Gb is a exemple)

If you want to go DIY road (probably the only way) here is a handy thread: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/unofficial_dvd_covers_for_gog_com_games
I would argue that most users cannot/don't understand patching at all, unless there's a youtube tuturial explaining step by step.
Not to mention that it would be impossible in cyber cafe style of machines (wich seems to be a awfull lot).

I have to say I am only happy we got rid of the physical games. I see nothing but downsides with them.

I used to have a couple hundred physical PC games, most in big cardboard boxes that were 90% full of air, and they took tons of space in my household. I finally got over to take out all the CDs/DVDs and manuals, and put them into tight plastic bags, and threw all the boxes and useless stuff inside them to trash. Suddenly my physical PC game collection took 1/10th of the space it took before, but still quite a lot.

I think quite a big portion of those CDs and floppies have become obsolete too as I already own digital copies of them in GOG, so I could easily throw many of those CDs + manuals to trash as well. Maybe even turn the rest to ISOs or something, if possible.

Having digital copies is just so much more convenient, easier, sexier, happier and overall more positive.

Ps. Your USB memory sticks would also become physically obsolete at some point when less and less PCs even have any USB-A ports, and have only USB-C. Sure you could use an adapter to overcome that, but that is a similar "solution" as using an external USB DVD-drive to use your optical disc games today, or maybe even an USB floppy drive to access floppy disk games.

Plus, my understanding is that USB memory stick (flash drives) are not necessarily that good for longtime archiving, ie. the data on them will be lost overtime if you don't power them up from time to time (ie. use them). At least I have some years old USB memory sticks that have been in the cupboard for many many years, and are not readable anymore.

USB flash drives are good for what they were designed to be in the first place, to be used quite often to transfer data, and as a "write rarely, read often" type of media.

The much more practical idea would be to pitch an Extra. A print ready box art. Find some chap cardboard. Print out the box art. Glue it to the cardboard and now you have a old fashion(.....im friggin old.....outliving stuff, where its old fashion) box!

Just be mindful of the medium for storage. You have to plug in and turn on your usb storage devices every year or so. Else they may degrade information.