Beyond the Cardboard Box is a series which follows up an earlier effort looking at games packaging and budget ranges in the 90s and 00s. The aim here is to cover anything of interest that might not have cropped up previously, and offer a few stray observations about the steady decline of the physical boxed game that we once knew and loved.

The charity shop hunt for hidden gems normally throws up a few familiar candidates: dusty favourites from the Sold Out or Xplosiv ranges, or perhaps an old copy of FIFA for the Xbox 360. Other boxed delights, especially for PC, are rarer, but usually worth a punt, especially for a couple of quid.

Part of the risk is that you might end up with, for example, a box for Command and Conquer: The First Decade containing a bonus DVD but not the actual game. Unless you’re the kind of person who wants to try and get a refund on a charity shop purchase, you’re kind of stuck. Do you put it on the shelf anyway, as if you actually owned the game? Keep it in some kind of second-tier collection, in storage somewhere? List it on eBay (with plenty of ***ASTERISKS*** making it clear that the game disc is missing) in the hope that someone might want it? Or do you just chuck it in the bin?

Scratched or missing discs notwithstanding, that old Xbox copy of FIFA should work when you get it home, as long as you’re in possession of a working 360. However, with PC gaming in the late 00s subject to the vagaries of copy protection, digital rights management, and defunct online platforms, that well-kept and complete looking game might as well be an empty box too.

Sitting in a box next to Command & Conquer are DVD cases housing discs for Borderlands 2 and the 2012 incarnation of XCOM: Enemy Unknown. However, both are entirely useless, as installation requires digital activation via Steam, an exercise clearly already undertaken by the original owners.

What to do with them now? For a time, the slightly obsessive-compulsive part of my brain reasoned that digital copies must be purchased for the sake of completeness, compounding the error of buying – effectively – empty boxes for games that I wouldn’t even normally have played (I’ve not really sampled much of the first Borderlands, and would doubtless be terrible at XCOM) by paying for them a second time. So far, at least, I’ve resisted.

Games for Windows Live is another culprit that potentially hobbles not-so-old boxed PC games. I once bought a new copy of Batman: Arkham Asylum, but only the revelation that the disc version would soon stop working stirred me into an attempt to install it, as I tried (unsuccessfully) to verify rumours that entering the serial code into Steam would reward me with a working digital copy. Meanwhile, I have no idea whether the two copies of Fallout 3 that I own (remarkably, bought in the same day, as I saw the GOTY edition in another shop mere minutes after snapping up the ‘vanilla’ release) will work. (The internet suggests they might not only be borked by GFWL, but also be unhappy with modern Windows.)

Modern console gamers will be familiar with the phenomenon of buying a boxed game containing a disc, only for installation to immediately prompt the download of a more updated version from the big mothership. However, on the PC, I find it hard to get my head around a box arriving with 2 x DVDs worth of new-ish Need for Speed game inside, only for me to be able to install it via the EA App with no call to even touch the discs. (Weirder still, I bought it from ubiquitous purveyors of grimy second-hand copies, CeX, which must mean that whoever sold or traded in the game must not have used it at all. Was it an unwanted gift? Had it fallen off the back of a lorry?)

Other head scratchers include the arrival by post of a new copy of Don Bradman Cricket 14, which contained one disc, no instructions, and two boxes: one with the usual blurb printed on the back, and another ‘steelbook’ special edition box, kind of like a metal pencil case from the 80s. Given that the game was, again, activated on Steam, even one mostly empty box seems a bit superfluous, but I have two.

Perhaps an ongoing attachment to physical copies, and the idea of physical copies, is a bit misguided in this day and age. The sense that being in possession of a box and a disc that you can take out and put into your computer is somehow a more meaningful representation of ‘ownership’ than just clicking a download link is giving way to the view that the production of boxes, discs and manuals is actually more wasteful than a digital download, which can always be updated with patches and mods as needed.

Still, I think there’s a distinction to be drawn between being able to open up a box and install a game before establishing whether any tweaks or further modifications are needed and this strange 2010s wasteland of cases and discs that are immediately rendered redundant upon installation. It’s a process of trying to sell you the idea of buying a physical copy, when really you’re buying a digital one.

For now, I guess I’ll keep my collection of these oddities, if only because it’s hard to imagine what else to do with them: sending them to landfill just feels wrong.