There will be a market for boxed games for quite awhile yet, but you won't necessarily get them at the same place. Publishers are moving toward selling "special boxed editions" online instead of selling them retail.

First game I ever bought was Civil War Generals II; then Caesar II, then Age of Empires II: The Conquerors (which is when I realized what PC gaming could be - and has been evolving into).  I've never owned a console. In one of the back rooms is a stack of old game boxes and manuals and I still go through them sometimes and remember them fondly. But now I order stuff exclusively through Steam/Impulse/D2D. It's just easier for me, and the retail versions of games aren't what they were. Sins of a Solar Empire was the last PC game I will ever buy boxed (and funny enough, if I'd ordered it online I would have gotten nice goodies). The physical Sins manual was kinda fun but now it's massively outdated anyway (hurray for post-release support!).

/my 2 cents

Yes I feel betrayed by Ebgames as well, ever since Gamestop bought them out they shifted focus.  I mean a PS3 is hard to compete with, but nothing beats the depth of a PC games.

I remeber the good ol days too of Electronics Boutique, and Egghead Software. Then Computer City, and Comp USA. 

I loved it when certain games like Falcon 4.0 gave you something like a folder with a nicely detailed manual (I felt like I could jump into a real Faclon and maybe even shoot another fighter down =-p), I still have it BTW.

I mean HAWX is pretty, but the arcadish feel is a deal breaker for me. 

While I welcome the Digital aspect of buying games, nothing beats a printed manual that is good quality.  One major gripe is that the price is still the same.  I think it is unfair because the publishing cost have to be a fraction of what there were, isn't that how Stardock competes with EA?  Then they could cut us some slack and be $10 cheaper than a retail box.

In the long term yes, digital distribution is probably going to be how it all is. Reason is partially because it's a little cheaper, but mainly because of convenience. When net connections are of a speed that you can get a game downloaded in 5 minutes or less, people aren't going to want to go to the store. They'll want it delivered right now.

However, that is going to be a good long while in coming. While GameStop hates PC gaming it seems, many places still have lots of shelf space for it. Best Buy has an entire isle for PC games including major titles, casual games, edutainment and so on. That's about the same amount of space any of the consoles have. At Target, it's about the same deal. So while some stores, notably GameStop’s group, have decided to pretty much (or even entirely) get rid of PC games, that's not universal.

It'll be a long while before digital distribution is the main way of getting games, and longer still before it is the only way. At this point, net connections have to get much faster. It can literally take people days to download a game, and many don't want to wait. On the other side of that is that the distributors have to be able to deal with it. Impulse seems to work great, giving full speed downloads, but Steam is badly overloaded. I rarely get better than 100kbytes/sec from Steam.

So you won't start to see a wholesale movement over to digital distribution until it has progressed to the point of being faster than going to the store. Once you can get pretty much instant gratification, then it is likely to start to squash out retail sales.

Though you never know, many people like owning physical goods. I know plenty of people who buy CDs in addition to or instead of online music because they want the actual disc, even though they listen only on an MP3 player and computer.

At this point, it sounds like you just need to find a better store. I'd check your local general stores (like Target, Wal-Mart and such) and electronics stores (like Best Buy). One or more of them is likely to have a large PC games selection.

A while back I started a topic called "Where has the value add gone" with the subtitles of "Dude where's my cloth map?".  I too think like you, however the overwhelming response and thus the will of the forums is that we're wrong.  We're wrong to want our Microprose 'black box' games, we're wrong to expect a full god damn manual in the retail packaging, we're wrong to not accept the crappy DVD jewlcases as 'normal' and we're completley and utterly wrong to want high quality pressed CD's (not ones with cheap and easy to scratch bottom layers). 

Retail will eventually die for the PC.  As it stands, it's the only machine which allows itself to be plugged in to content distribution systems AND has the raw storage capacity to pull it off, I too think that the next incarnation of the Wii, PlayStation and XBox will have their internal storage heavily boosted and plugged in to their respective owners digital content feed. 

What irks me is that digital downloads isn't seen by publishers as a way to remove the idiocies of DRM (and by DRM in this case I mean limited activations, limited installs and similar) its seen as ANOTHER layer of DRM they can add to the game.  So not only are you locked in to that publishers content system (or their chossen 3rd party) but you still have all the fun and games you did previously.    I can clearly see a day in the near future, when people are faced with a game they've paid for, used repatedly and quite like, refusing to download on their new system due to a limiter the publishers have placed on it.

I'm also, to a degree, against digital distribution as they seem to be taking programming shortcuts (.net) and it locks me in to a specific OS (Windows) making it harder to me to use things like (DAR)WINE to run games on a different OS (OS X and Linux respectivley).

I find it interesting that Steam will be the only major digital distributor still forcing you to use a client. Once GG dropped their client, I actually became interested in buying from them.

I think special editions can be to the videogame industry what vinyl records are to the music industry. Vinyl sales are actually booming, despite the huge growth in digital sales. Many records even come with a code so you can also download the mp3 files. With vinyl, you get a nice record, the mp3 files, album artwork, inserts, etc. Plus you can't really pirate an album, right?

Actually, there are some very good reasons to roll your own outside of "run on other OS's".   The first being, to use the example of .net.  Which version?  v1, v2.x, v3, v3.x or a newer flavour I'm not as yet aware of?  What happens when Microsoft retires the runtime components of the earlier version?  What happens when you discover that some of the API functions in the latest version don't quite spit out the same thing as they did previously?    IE is another fine example, bolt in to its DLL's and rendering engine then find the latest version does things in a never before seen way, with no warning from Microsoft this change was hitting you.   Your working application is now horribly broken.  The customer blames you, you look like a fool.  

Better to do the leg work, roll your own and then your only reliant on the glacial progress of the basic Windows API's rather than any bolt ons to it (even Vista still has some Win16 API functions avaliable). 

And finally, yes, yes I can complain that a Windows program doesn't run in WINE.  It should.

I find my boxed games irksome sometimes too.  But then I remember than I'm beholden to no content system to run them (I have a RW full of retail version noCD cracks I keep tucked away for future yse).   The lifespan of a product avaliable on say Steam has yet to be proven, it's still a very new system.

I didn't buy Empire: Total War simply because of the Steam requirements, which is saying something as I've bought every single Total War product released since Shogun. Frankly, I found the sudden requirment for to install redundant third party software a slap in the face to long time supporters of the series.

How do you think i feel. i live in a town that has a population of 12,000 (more or less). We have three places that sell video games (one of which is a second hand store, and another a K-Mart). And the third place is the only one that sells PC games and only has 7X8 shelf for them, half of which are Starcraft and Diablo 2. And for those wondering how backwater my hometown is, its actually biggest commercial hub between Pendleton and Portland in Nothern Oregon (cause of all the little towns around us). We got (i think) 8 car dealerships at least!

Do you know how long i had to wait to buy a copy of Gal Civ 2? EIGHT MONTHES! I about tempted to order a copy.

Needless to say i feel that PC games in general are treated as the redheaded stepchild of Gaming(no offense to any redheaded stepchildren).

ROFL

Truth be told, it's been a damn long time since I bought a PC game from a shop. I order off the internet almost exclusively - cheaper, easier, less head ache.

TBH, I perfer having a box rather than downloading a game online, call me old fashioned I like something to hold on to, that is probably when I was so opposed in getting entrenchment in the first place. Most of my steam games I got from boxed dvd's , and I don't really mind paying a little extra for a good hard box, means that I can re-install without internet

Gamestop makes most of its money from used game sales. PC games are not conductive to that.

As a PC game purchaser, I fail to see the problem with Gamestop only carrying a shelf or two of PC games. There are plenty of better ways to purchase PC games.

To which i can only answer; CoBol & Asm mnemonics.

99.5% of the infrastructure is ALL there, 75% of coders worldwide only swear by those two, and third level generation alternatives serve as any given OS backbones locomotive. That push rather than shove or innovate.