I want to paint you a picture from a publisher’s viewpoint.
As a publisher of games you lose tons of money using brick-and-mortar shops. This costs you a lot of money no two ways about it.
First, you need to split your profit with the retailer, right off the bat you’ve lost a major chunk of your profitability. Then take into account other things like pressing discs, printing manuals and packaging, the cost of the packaging materials, the cost of packing it all up in cartons for shipping to retail outlets and then actually shipping all of those games to the retailers.
Now, the games are there and consumers can buy and…wait a second, what about all those games that don’t sell or are returned for various reasons? Well that’s another major cash-sucking vortex. This happens in most industries that need to print product. Books, magazines, newspapers etc… If they don’t sell, they go back to whomever sent them to the retailer and that’s another chunk of your profitability.
Read more at Gamers Daily News