timppu: Back when I had Amiga 500, I recall buying some Amiga game (I think it was some kind of 3D space shooter) that came with a separate C-cassette, containing music for the game.
The music on the cassette was some kind of synth pop (it sounded kinda cool, but meh...), and IIRC didn't sound anything like the actual game music within the game. I recall thinking it was kinda odd to add such a cassette to the game with one tune in it, when it didn't really seem to have anything to do with the game anyway.
EDIT: Googling for it, apparently quite many Amiga games actually came with a separate C-cassette with one song in them. Quite odd, but I guess some people then wanted them...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUYKauCcutw That Compact Cassette was a cassingle (cassette single) of the title screen music, not the gameplay music.
Carrier Command title music Back then, getting full orchestral versions of the MIDI and tracked MOD music from a game was a Big Deal, and gamers actively wanted it.
By the mid 1990s, that want had been reduced by the use of Yellow Book standard Mixed Mode CDs, where one part of the CD was a data CD rom, but the other part of the CD was an audio CD which could be played on any CD player.
An example of such a game CD in my own collection of games is the 1996 game, Forsaken.
Forsaken Forsaken intro video, the actual video on the game CD is an AVI file.
One of the tracks from it
Track 6 - Pure B...h Power By the 2000s, however, that had also been replaced, by the games shipping with their music in MP3 or OGG.
So the only call for a soundtrack CD was when one was needed for a Collector's Edition of a game.
To try to protect the in game soundtracks from copyright infringement, the music began being put in data archives which players could not easily get into at first.
Which brings us to now, where GOG is including the unarchived soundtracks as downloadable Goodies, or selling the soundtracks separately.
The sole point of complaint I have with selling the game soundtracks separately, is when such games are put into GOG lootbox gambles, like the Pinatas from earlier in the year, and the current Mystery Stars.
Games where they are fully complete with no extra purchases needed should be the only games being made available in the lootboxes.
Edit: Fix link formatting
