Why not both? LRG is a good concept its just a shitty company. Showing there is a market for something is not a bad thing, hopefully one day a better competitor to LRG will step up. Not sure why this whole thing is worth a slap fight over.
No, it's really not. For their older stuff, especially for consoles, most of their releases are on the same tier as repros with the same dubious quality but never at the same cost.
It does nothing to change the paradigm of physical vs. digital--the big ticket games especially on PC don't see a physical release anymore. They're not going to be shipping 7+ DVDs for installation, only some plastic crap and a download code. (Apparently that's a bridge too far).
The new-ish stuff (relatively speaking) comes out in such extremely limited quantities that it's not worth it at all. The thing about physical games is that they were going to be an option for you, and often times they still had stock years down the road. Even without backtracking on "we're going to make
only X copies and then you can get fucked", if there's demand for it they can print more according to demand. Half of the games LGR makes has little correlation with "demand", such as a bunch of older meme games that are re-released that no one asked for (
Plumbers Don't Wear Ties) or ROMs that were bargain binned years ago (
Felix the Cat,
Bill & Ted's Excellent Video Game Adventure).
Despite the fact that pressing optical discs is still cheap (and that's without CD-R), NOTHING is inexpensive with LGR. If you actually remember when games came on optical disc, there were often inexpensive re-releases of old games on CD. If they didn't come individually at deep cuts (I think I purchased
SimAnt, which was a little more than a decade old, in a school book fair for maybe 5-10 bucks) they were packed together. In 1996, Maxis released SimClassics, which featured
SimCity (1989),
SimAnt, and
SimFarm, all together at a value price (they had been ported to Windows). In 1995, LucasArts had "The LucasArts Archives Vol. I" which included (
Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis,
Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle,
Sam & Max Hit the Road, and a Star Wars screensaver kit ("Star Wars Screen Entertainment"). And THAT was when all of those games were fresh. In the late 1990s with more back catalog, there were more titles available that were sold together.
LGR rarely sells anything of a compilation that's not outdated ROMs. There's "Award Winning Indie Gems 4-in-1" coming soon for Switch and PS4 and it's all pretentious garbage that I've personally never heard of (
Endling: Extinction is Forever,
Through The Darkest Of Times,
One Hand Clapping, and
El Hijo: A Wild West Tale). They've even asking for $50 or so for "Atari Recharged Volume One", which is graphically enhanced versions of
Breakout and
Asteroids. These games are around fifty years old. Hasbro (which owned these games back in the late 1990s) made similar re-releases after they purchased the Atari back catalog from JTS Corporation and people didn't care for it much then, either.
So what
is LGR really good for, fundamentally? They weren't the ones that dredged up the old Digital Pictures games from the grave (I watched the trailer for the "Hard Hat Edition" of
Kids on Site which I only had the demo of, still, it's surreal to see the video in higher resolution beyond 320x224)...that was an outfit called Screaming Villains. LGR isn't bringing the newest titles to physical when nobody else will...you're SOL on that one. They don't have a huge catalog to buy from if you absolutely refuse to go digital (not some video game version of DeepDiscount.com) because they don't create that many games. They don't have budget re-releases of games that you could finally get physical if you missed for whatever reason.
They are simply a company profiting off of bugman CONSOOOOOOOOOM culture without any credit or redeeming value of their own.
