You are letting pieces of worthless plastic entice you to keep obsolete stores in bussiness. You are convinced the act of owning something physical is more valuable than the experience of having the game. Similar to the people obssesed with having physical books, they are more into the idea of owning a book than into reading it.
Physical is better than digital in all instances other than ease of replacement. The biggest problems with digital—served up the way Steam does it, is that you cannot revert to a previous update by reinstalling, and (authentication aside) you cannot even install it without Internet—and that has to be high-speed, and very high bandwidth. Most ISP's in the US cap their [lied about] 'unlimited' internet connection to a paltry number of gigs per month; (by paltry I mean 20-35, but as low as 3 to 5gb is not unheard of). That means that the subscriber cannot download a major release game without maxing their bandwidth usage for the MONTH—if they even have that much. The lie about 'unlimited' here in the US, is that after a fixed amount of data, they drop the speed to comparable with dial-up. Oh yes it's unlimited... but it's like unlimited drips from a faucet, as opposed to full stream from a firehose.
When I was with AT&T, they limited my bandwidth to 22GB per month. That could easily mean that Steam alone could cause me to suffer dial-up speed for weeks by its mandatory system & game updates. As it is, my new ISP allows just 35GB per month... and after then I can watch the Google logo load chunk by chunk in realtime.
R.Graves is correct, about there being a vast swath of middle America that is stuck on dial-up or outrageously priced satellite based ISP service. The insidious thing here is that developers sell physical game discs with just the Steam installer on it... When the hapless customer buys that they can't even use it without hauling their desktop PC into town; and do it again for each required update. It wouldn't be so bad if Valve offered downloadable installers for the games, but they don't—yet that's what the discs are supposed to be; local copies of the installer.
**As was mentioned earlier... Like with GTA[?] the music license expired, and anyone without the physical disc installer, has now permanently lost a big chunk of the music. Digital distribution allows them to reach out and take back from the customer.
***Sadly, this applies to GoG as well, for unless you hold onto the previous offline installers (too), any changes they make are irrevocable, the user is stuck with them.
As for books... as any cynic should know, they can edit a [hosted] digital book, and it edits them all; but they cannot edit a hardback on the owner's bookshelf; (or saved PDFs, true). Did you miss the time that Amazon took back purchased copies of 1984? (And of course the apropos nature of that wasn't missed.)
Books can be more than the sum of their words, and I know of at least one fellow who recently released a [physical] book that was custom scented—because you cannot put that in a digital ebook. Myself I would choose a physical book over a PDF any day—not least for the reason that I can read it while using (applying it to) my computer, and not having to share the screen with a PDF reader.