The bigger difficulty comes from the increasing complexity of games (feature wise) and their release state.

It's effectively impossible to release a "gold version" game to the quality standards of ~1990 physical media, in 2026.

The surface area for potential gameplay bugs is too large: it'd take another decade of QA polish.

So even if you have physical media for the release day version of a game, what can you do with that? Play a buggy version?

To GP's point about post-release physical editions, it makes more sense to sell something later that rolls up the most critical post-release patches and content.

If the game they release on a physical disk is unplayably buggy, do they owe you a refund? Even if online updates make it perfect? They can't require that you play it online unless its not even available physically.