I miss manuals...

I’m more let down that such a small thing is packaged in a big case. Made of plastic no less.

Yeah, I find it particularly weird, because Nintendo already had smaller boxes with the Nintendo DS. Did they decide that the Switch was a big boy console, so it needed to have comically large boxes?
- so it needed to have comically large boxes?
  Man you would have had a field day with PC gaming in the 90's!
  In fairness though, even though some did skimp out and just launch a CD in, most had a manual and something of lore interest or a physical anti-piracy thing, and a fair few were stuffed full of trinkets or other world building material... just because.
  Even my Atari ST edition of Zak McKracken had the floppy, manual, passport anti-piracy card, and a faux-magazine which was both hilarious and acted as a hint book too.
- The total footprints of the two cases are virtually identical. The Switch game cases are taller but not as deep, and the DS cases are shorter and deeper. I believe the DS case is basically the same dimension as a cut-down DVD case. It's the same depth, +/- a mm, with 65mm chopped off the top.
  The NDS game case is 134x125mm, 167.5 square cm in total. The Switch game case is 105x170mm, 178.5 square cm in total. The Switch case is also thinner, 11mm vs 15mm. The amounts of plastic used in each is pretty similar.
They need something that both looks good on a shelf and is harder to just slip into a pocket.
- They could make it out of cardboard at the very least.
Well, aren't these supposed to be collected? They are there to help your sort through your phisical games
- And my collection would do well with more GameBoy-size cases
- I'd rather use a case with something to hold all my carts in personally for sorting. Better if it's small and easily portable.
But without those big-ass cases, there wouldn't be a market for these.
I miss cardboard game boxes
Aluminum cases need to become standard for physical copies. Not plastic with an aluminum veneer, all aluminum.
They can be cool and do aluminum tubes holding a flash drive with the game on it if they want so they can laser engrave the sides and screw on top with the title and art.
- So your take on an environmentally unfriendly and resource-intensive way to package games would be to make it worse?
- I remember getting Prince of Persia 2008 in a steel case for a birthday or maybe Xmas and loved the design of it. I haven't seen my steel case editions recently.
The original Gameboy just had form fitting plastic containers for the cartridge and cardboard boxes. id love a return to that..

The height of new game glory for me were the old school huge boxes PC games came in. It wasn't uncommon to get a thick manual with wonderful art, sometimes spiral bound, maps, other neat add-ins. Even console games had nice manuals with useful information you may not otherwise know. I miss that stuff.

- I collapsed and recycled all of my large PC game boxes out of necessary, but I have every single manual/map/pack-in though!
I wrote a similar reply to a higher comment without seeing yours, and I completely agree - I miss it.
I was a bit younger in the 90s and half the magic of the ride home was reading the manual so you could hit the ground running when you installed it/put the cartridge in/loaded the tape.
I very distinctly remember pouring over the City of Heroes art book/manual they shipped with that game.
Man I loved that game. So fun.
Way back in the day places like Working Designs sent Lunar and Lunar 2 out with badass merch and maps. They were amazing.

If anyone is old enough to remember Infocom games, they came with "feelies," just random fun stuff related to the game they decided to include. It occasionally was needed to solve a game puzzle, but usually not.

I can still smell that box. They had a certain smell back then.

When people talk about games having heart, this is it. Little unnecessary goodies just because you're excited that people are buying your game and you want them to be into it.
- Getting a new game and having books and stickers to mess with on the ride home until you can play the game.
Myst and Riven had the greatest boxes! Then also The 11th Hour and Phantasmagoria.

Why are there clips for a manual yet never a manual or even an info card? Seems like this started in the PS3/360/Wii generation.

Some games come with an insert or a manual, but it's rare.
And it's cheaper to have only one case design rather than two
Yeah, as Godort said, some games do come with manuals. The Knights of the Old Republic (the first one) port to the Switch is one example. (Presumably KOTOR II as well.)

Still better than just a code 😅

weird take ngl
Buy cheap microsd
Copy game from pc to chip
???
- Tell me what console or system or even game manufacturer that lets you buy their game, download it to a portable micro SD and then lets you play it from there.
  Not even steam lets you do that and you don't even have a direct way of knowing what's on the micro SD card without making a label for it which good luck.

is this real? no way right?

For like a decade yes
Sadly, yes. Got a switch for Xmas this year. Went and bought a mario game, and was completely taken aback when the inside of the case looked just like this. I sat there totally feeling this exact post.

Those booklets were more joy to little me on the car ride home than the game itself many a time.

Farming Simulator 2011 had a big map poster
Oh but I have Kingdome Come: Deliverance on like seven dvds

They want you to feel that way, say "what's the point" and buy digital...

Physical I can sell again! Big advantage right there.
- They don't like that part lol
- Now you're on Nintendos list.

At least it has something in it, not just a piece of paper with an online download code...

Be thankful there is still a case to open and a cartridge inside, for now at least.

Still sad to see, there’s no feeling like the anticipation that builds from reading a game manual on the car or bus ride home.

Untitled goose game was surprisingly the last game I bought that had a case full of swag.

It's why I stopped buying physical games, I'll just pirate everything if they take away my digital library.

At least sometimes they double-side print the cover, this is just lazy.

Leather Goddesses of Phobos came with a scratch-n-sniff card. If I recall correctly, you can't win the game without it.
The map in GTA3. There was a mission towards the end of the game I kept failing; to deliver a corrupt FBI agent to the airport. Eventually I realised, after studying the map, I could bypass all the road blocks by taking the light rail system. I felt like an 11 year old Einstein.
- Is that the timed mission where they posted up enemies everywhere with rocket launchers along the normal route? That mission ended my last attempt at a playthrough, still never finished GTA3

Me too, all of these automatics and the paddle shifters... It's not the same.

The lack of game manuals in game cases still makes me sad.

Are they trying to sell digital manuals? Or was it just about the $.10 per copy savings?
- conpanies usually either bake it into the game as tutorials or have digital manuals nowadays. it was always about cutting physical sales cost (as the physical media itself has a cost attached to it)
  IDK how it works on the current console devices, but on the yhe previous generation, the wiiu for example would give the player the option to open the digital manual when the game is launched by pressing the home button and selecting the manual. one of yhe pros is that the manuals digitally tend to be more complete and not rushed to save on cost. take for example, the Xenoblade Chronicle X manual is 142 pages long, something that would basically never exist physically.
- it's penny pinching, some have soulless digital manuals.

Makes me sad too

Even better if it’s one of the games that can’t even fit on the cartridge.

So much plastic. We need to go digital only already

Yes, because who wants to own their shit when they can just perpetually lease it with the unending dread of losing it all at any moment (digital platform of choice) shuts down or just says fuck you, we're taking the games away and you cant do shit about it.
- DRM-free digital copies that can be backed up to personal storage so access cannot be revoked.
- I didn't say you don't get to own it. Stop defending plastic which just ends up in the environment, slaughtering innocent animals.
  Just back up your games to a HDD

You paid all that for my PlayStation memory card!

Technical Support: Your Mom

Harrasment Hotline: Her sisters

Return policy: Come to the swap meet and try to find me, Bitch!

Always funny to me to be reminded that in some countries game came with manuals.

Here it was always just a cartridge/disk. Possibly the reason the most popular NES game was Battle City instead of Super Mario Bros.