[garciansmith]

Games that require an online account, whether physical or not, are all bad, yes.

But a lot of games are playable just fine without any patches, and there are plenty of physical releases, especially of indie games, which come out after the digital release and include all the patches. And putting aside the nice aspect of owning a physical object (often with cool things like a manual or map in the past and still true with many indie releases now) you still have no control over digital downloads unless it's DRM free, and even then you need to keep back up copies because the service you downloaded it from might disappear.

[0x457]

Booklets and maps are thing of the past. If you want more than a disc in a box you have to buy collectors edition that been a thing for the last decade, probably.

Indie games rarely come out on physical media. If you want a physical object for the sake of having a physical object - buy/print cases and print covers. Alternatively, get into vinyl, those at least can be presented as wall art.

> you still have no control over digital downloads unless it's DRM free

Again, with consoles you don't have control over physical discs/cartridges either. Nothing stops Sony and MS follow Nintendo. You can only "own" something if it's fully offline and DRM-free (be it officially DRM-free or liberated by nice people)