The limited-press houses Special Reserve and Super Rare have both announced that they're starting to do "physical-only" releases — games that will never have a digital release (supposedly, anyway) and which are exclusive to that initial print run.
I like this idea, for reasons I'll get onto in a moment. But there are also a fair few people who seem to be super mad about this, making some seriously questionable arguments against it, too. I've even seen some people go so far as to say releasing on a digital storefront (where, let's not forget, we've already seen plenty of games vanish without trace for years, often permanently) is better preservation than sticking something in a box.
For my money, I think it's great, because it solves the one big problem that a lot of indie developers making risky projects have: discovery. Release something a bit weird onto Steam or Itch, and chances are it will disappear into the depths of the flood of stuff released every day, sinking without trace unless you're fortunate enough to have made something that goes viral or becomes a meme.
Conversely, through the programmes these companies are offering, they help fund development of projects that probably wouldn't have been greenlit through conventional publishing houses, then provide a lengthy open preorder window for people to pick up a copy and devote their marketing efforts to promoting that game, making people aware of it and ensuring that copies get into the hands of reviewers ahead of launch.
The downside to this — and the source of most people's objections — is that if you weren't in that initial batch of preorders, you're not getting that game. But realistically… if you didn't buy that game on its launch weekend on Steam, Itch or wherever, were you really going to buy it anyway? It's still relatively rare that indie titles become sensations years or even months after their original launch; more often than not they're just lost.
The other reason I find the vehement objections so puzzling is because we had nearly seven hardware generations of "physical only" being the way we bought games. Games getting simultaneous physical and digital releases only started to become a thing in the mid-to-late PS3 and Xbox era — and, as I've spoken about elsewhere before, small-scale indie games ended up ghettoised into digital-only marketplaces like Xbox Live Arcade, which a lot of players assumes offered somehow "lesser" experiences.
I guess a lot has changed in the outgoing hardware generation in terms of attitude, but I've never been a big fan of "the digital future" anyway. I recognise that it's allowed a lot of creators to release things that they never would have otherwise been able to release — but as time has gone on that has become more and more of a mixed blessing. With each passing year, the market has become more and more flooded with ever-increasing piles of low-effort crap, meaning the genuinely worthwhile stuff often gets drowned.
And the media have a part to play in this, too. Compare how many column inches were spent on that fucking $8 calculator app for Nintendo Switch versus, say, the outstanding Astalon: Tears of the Earth. You can see why some indies might want to try something a bit different.
Anyway, that's my two penneth on the subject. I'll be doing what I always do with games: grabbing stuff that looks like it might be of interest, and passing up on things I know probably won't be my jam. So far as I'm concerned, this is pretty much business as usual.
