[Taqwus]

One problem with digital-everything: it becomes trivial to put an essentially identical distribution onto, say, P2P systems. For a game that offers a decent single-player mode and does not involve heavy copy protection with online activation or so forth, this is risky. While a physical manual can be scanned (although one can make this harder, through the use of extremely ugly color schemes -- SimCity copyright sheet, anyone? -- 300 pages of that would be insane), at the least it's something that differentiates the licensed from the non.

One of the more common arguments you'll hear about P2P music is that if the studios don't want people to simply download their music for nothing, they should offer extras -- the experience of a performance, goodies with the physical CD, et al. From a pragmatic point of view, this is not unreasonable in either music or software. A good bound manual would seem to qualify so long as the users are willing to absorb the cost.