Re: 75% of new games purchased were downloaded

On Mon, 23 Sep 2024 22:36:54 -0500, Altered Beast
<j63480576@gmail.com> wrote:

>
It sounds to me like the gaming industry makes bank on downloading
versus physical product.  They certainly haven't printed a manual in a
few ages.

They barely even make PDF manuals anymore.

In fairness, few games actually need them. Not only have in-game
tutorials become quite good, game design has standardized enough that
there's much less _need_ to teach players how to game anymore.

And game visuals and world-design is complex enough that the secondary
purpose of manuals --to flesh out the game-world-- is rarely necessary
too.

So writing manuals is an expensive proposition that serves no purpose
except to make a tiny percentage of gamers happy. After all, even
_were_ a manual necessary, most people _still_ wouldn't RTFM.

I still miss those old-school manuals, though. Whether it was those
giant tomes you'd get in flight simulators, the wonderfully
illustrated manuals in CRPGs, or the manuals in strategy games which
went over every mechanical detail of the game, they were great fun to
read.