because most new games today require downloads in some form anyway. You can't play a disk without an internet connection the way you could in the past; so it's without purpose. The disks are license tokens now.

Fuck, the last time I bought a game for the PS, it didn't even have a proper disk. It had a game key for the PS store.

there were other ways in which that shift was manufactured, too, like early access through downloads; and the fucked up shit of delivering crappy buggy games that they then fix over the next month.