I agree that it’s not a price issue because I wouldn’t mind paying inflated prices if that money went to the workers. It would be worth it, in fact. But the corporate entities that get that money while the workers get laid off.

The discs served as a proxy for licensing, right? It’s easy to conflate owning the disc with owning the rights to play the game; but it’s also easy to have DRM render discs useless if a game has “phone home” to unlock itself.

People don’t necessarily want discs, they want to own a copy of the game. It’s not a physical medium that really separates the two, it’s licensing and DRM software.

I betcha it’s not about economic or computational efficiency, it’s about politics. They’re data centers outside of any national borders, perfect for data laundering. It’s leverage for corporations to transcend sovereign borders.