Digital storefronts are usually closed shops. A boxed copy can be sold by retailers, marketplaces, collectors, and ordinary players, which gives the price somewhere else to go.

A disc or cartridge is something you can keep, lend, trade, resell, gift, or put on a shelf. A digital purchase can feel permanent until licences, accounts, stores, or hardware access change.

Physical media helps games survive delistings, storefront closures, broken accounts, and shifting publisher priorities. Not perfectly, but better than a market with no copies at all.

New, pre-owned, sale, trade-in, wallet credit, and marketplace pricing all create routes around the single digital checkout price.