GOG wants to bring back physical games, but it’s ‘a very, very complicated thing’

I remember when I’d get bored as a kid, I’d marvel at the back covers of my older brother’s PC game boxes—stuff like Guild Wars: Factions and the original World of Warcraft box, the inner cover of which showed a dwarf thwacking a yeti with that one epic sword that looked like a lightsaber. Even back then, the long switch to digital was underway, seemingly for good. But what if we could go back to the glory days of big, embossed boxes and girthy manuals?

That’s the “dream” of GOG’s senior business development and partnerships manager, Marcin Paczynski, as he recently told Gamesradar. Specifically, he wants to see a world where you “would be able to buy physical versions of [games] on GOG … You go to your shelf on GOG, you click on the game that you would like to receive a physical copy of, you order it, and it gets to you. That would be a perfect scenario.”

I’m sure most PC gaming diehards would agree that, yes, an option to buy physical games—especially older games in a precarious state with regard to preservation—would be pretty neat. Even if you’re the sort to snag DRM-free copies of everything you own, a disc makes a game easier to show off, keep close in the event that your hard drive explodes, or place in the seat across from you at a Michelin star restaurant.

The problem for GOG is that physical distribution is basically an entirely different business to running a digital storefront. “Because we are talking about physical media, we need to think about logistics, we need to think about storage,” Paczynski said, adding that it’s “a very, very complicated thing.” But the idea has been on the company’s collective mind “for years now,” so he’s not ruling it out.

If you don’t want to wait, there’s always projects like Big Box Collection that let you print your own facsimiles. Or buy used! A few scratches and a giant sticker reading “PROPERTY OF TREVOR” just lends character, right?