Originally by: Jmanis Catharg

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Personally the industry can only blame itself for this.

Back in the day (waves a walking cane around) the *physical* game was fantastic. You'd pay your $50-$100 and get a nice big A4 size cardboard box with cool artwork, mockup shots, and inside was a gorgeous manual.
The 'Dark Reign' manual was fantastic imo, Starcraft had 100s of pages of backstory, and games back in the day such as "The Settlers" and K240 on Amiga gained just as much value from reading the manuals as you did from actually playing the game.

Now my fellow gamers surround me with a "Clock the game, push it on" mentality. Nobody wants to 'experience' games anymore, they just want to finish it and shelve it, knowing it'll never go anywhere else again. And the marketing employed this day and age matches this attitude.

I was incredibly disappointed when I bought Dune 2000 and found the manual came *only* in PDF form on a CD. Looking at the pages the manual would've looked great in a bound printed version. Instead they went cheap and nasty (while still keeping a $50-100 pricetag like games of old). Yeah I had it in PDF, but there's a big difference having something electronic vs something you can hold in your hands and turn the pages of.

Games these days come in a tiny DVD case with a 10 page manual telling you the controls, a couple hard-to-see black and white screenshots and, well,, that's about it. It's pretty bloody pathetic, and it fuels the "Clock it, ditch it for some cash back" mentality. The packaging of the games doesn't make any attempt to endear you to the games.

I look to my XBox/Xbox 360 games and just see a stack of green cases tucked away under the TV unit. I look to my old PC games of Dark Reign/Starcraft displayed proudly on my bookshelf like someone would display an expensive set of books.

Back in the day people would keep the boxes and manuals intact, because you knew your $80+ purchase would only get you about $5 if you didn't have a nice box and manual to go with it. Now I see second hand games with nothing more than, for example, an empty Xbox case with the DVD and a white piece of paper with the games name scribbled on it being flogged off for only a fraction less than it's new, boxed up with manual counterpart.

Gaming isn't a niche anymore, the domain of only the biggest nerds. It's mainstream. And the result of it becoming mainstream is poor quality merchandise nobody wants to keep and more often than not, poor quality games with no content or depth, just shiny graphics and noises, with the now-mandatory "multiplayer function" touted as a "feature".

It's quite pathetic really.

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