While I understand the convenience of digital(many of the CDs I own have never actually been played and have only been put in a optical drive to rip them to the flacs I have copied to multiple harddrives and onto the SD card in my portable media player) and digital makes possible the release of things that would have never seen the light of day in the physical only era, I do feel like something has been lost as we shifted to digital being the default, and in many cases, only option, even for stuff published by companies for which a physical release would be trivial(or at least, would be if they hadn’t gutted their ability to make physical releases).
I’m not old enough to remember the feelies of the Infocom era, but even in the days prior to me going blind, I remember lamenting how manuals for mainstream video games had already seen a drastic decline going from the latter half of the 90s to the early 10s, how game cases where turning into swiss cheese, and the disappearance of officially published player’s guides for many Triple-A titles, and it often annoyed me how things like art books, soundtrack CDs, and other physical swag where often restricted to collector’s editions of new games and almost impossible to get hold of short of pre-ordering.
Of course, part of the problem is that physical manufacturing is often either very high unit cost for on-demand or very high minimum order quantity for reasonable unit cost, the former often pricing out all but the richest fans, the latter incurring high risk if one miscalculates demand(make too few, and you risk scalpers extorting your richest fans and leaving the rest high and dry, make too many and you risk not bringing in enough sales to break even). And as cool as 3-D printing is, my understanding is we’re still a ways off from the average person being able to print an action figure or lego set on a cheap desktop printer with no technical knowledge, no need to babysit the printer, and the endd result be on par with an injection molded version, and at best, at home 3-D printing is still mostly limited to using multiple types of plastic and some materials that mix plastic with some kind of non-plastic powder.. And as far as I know, as old as textiles are, there’s still no real way of doing plushies or anything with customized clothing fancier than silkscreening…
Though, if I were in charge of a game studio and didn’t have to contend with the limitations of physical manufacturing, things I would love to be able to offer to my audience would include:
-All in-game locations as 3-d printable terrain for tabletop gaming, ideally modular and customizeable, perhaps even a level editor with an export for 3d printing option.
-Table top minis, statuettes and action figures of all PCs, NPCs, and enemies.
Physical sound track.
Official character art embroidered in high relief on shirts, bags, wall scrolls, etc.
Plushies of anything cute and cuddly in the game.
Physical props of any important in-game artifact.
et cetera.
Of course, that’s all a high bar and more of a pipedream than actually making a professinal quality game release, but a guy can dream and who knows, maybe someone will make an embroidery printer that can convert any generic image file into embroidery on a t-shirt with results at least as good as using an inkjet printer and iron transfer for silkscreening.
