It cuts both ways, games would take half decades to get done or only cover a thousandth of the ground current games cover. Imagine what Minecraft would be, shipped on physical media.

We also wouldn't get games like Goat Simulator who basically set a low expectation bar in exchange for low cost, best effort game play. I'm kind of ok with more "garbage" if we also get more weird/low budget games that wouldn't exist otherwise.

> games would take half decades to get done

...which is still true today. It's common that large titles take 4+ years in development if they're not built on an existing game's engine and actually release in a finished state. Activision was able to release a new CoD every year because they cycled through 3 studios of which each had 3 years time for a game that's mostly a mod of the previous one with slight improvements to the underlying tech. And even then it's now almost expected that it'll take another 3+ months to get in a state that the game was meant to be released in.

> only cover a thousandth of the ground current games cover

That may be true if you go back to the Atari era, but even ~30 years old RPGs can still hold up well in terms of content. It's great that now we don't always need publishers to create & ship games and can release updates online, but that's no excuse to sell incomplete products.

There was a time in the gaming market were quickly developed, cheap, often not-so-good games on physical media were a thing: 8-bit home computer era. So it's possible to imagine that coming back in more modern times, in a timeline were internet wasn't the obvious alternative.

I agree, I'm not saying things were necessarily better then.

I've read somewhere that it wasn't always the case that something worked flawlessly on physical media.

Things are way different now.

Indeed. The old MacAddict magazine shipped a CD with every issue. The CD contained loads of shareware/games/utilities/productivity software etc.

The CD also had a folder named "updates and patches" where you could find installers for the latest bug fixes of the most popular MacOS software.

CDs bundled with monthly magazines was a valid conduit for getting patches to users at the time.

Some 360 games shipped with console updates as well. Required to be applied before you could play the game.

Take a look at the games from that era and the games you get right now. Sure, more has changed than just being able to update things, but the ability to fix issues later and continually update games has lead to much much better games with way more content. And you can always chose to wait a year for everything to settle.

I actually think that may not always be for the best. Games are released in beta, and qa takes place in the months and years after release, if ever.

Updates can be issued, but it increasingly means that things are released in a state where updates NEED to be issued

I don't find this to be much of an issue because rarely is this ever a shock or surprise to the semi educated consumer. The game comes out and you see 100 people complain on reddit that it's buggy, so you just don't buy it until its resolved. Steam also has a pretty no fuss refund system for the cases you didn't see anything beforehand.

What seems to happen is people want the game as soon as possible but also complain when it isn't perfect on release but overall they enjoy playing it sooner more than they are bothered by its lack of polish.

I'm still playing older games. What new games do you recommend?

Going to depend on what you like. But my favorite modern games have been Rimworld, Skyrim (still part of the internet era), and Planet Zoo. I love how all of these games provide hundreds of hours of possible gameplay without getting stale.

And if you have VR, Pavlov has been the most fun I have ever had gaming. It looks like a CSGO clone on the surface but it becomes the most absurd/surreal experience ever with custom maps. It's almost like playing laser tag in one of those optical illusion room of mirrors type attractions.

Indie games might be a good place to start. Whatever genre of older games you are into, there are probably new indie games exploring the same ideas.