EDIT: Bleh. Digging through the pre-order site once more I found a small bit of text with "See what's inside" or something that confirmed the physical version does indeed just come with a download code. Lame. Guess I might as well buy it digitally then.

In general, not surprising in this day and age, sadly. But especially disappointing coming from the "great proponents of DRM-free and launcher-free games". What better way to distribute such games than on a physical medium? No internet requirement, even during initial download. The most explicit ownership of and control over the product that the customer could ever have. But no, GOG goes the same route all the other insidious mega-corporations do. Why even bother selling a physical version then, though?

Those are pretty much my exact thoughts. I still want the game, and I still like GOG, but I won't be paying for a physical version that... doesn't actually have a physical version. I've come to expect this from steam games, where you basically get a dvd which just has the 3MB steam installer, but from GOG I actually expected better; they tend to go against the norm. Oh well.

That would be more expensive than discs. For the people who want the physical stuff.

And like Andreas quoted, 5.25" drives are practically nonexistent in modern PCs.

This cuts two ways though. If software devs would still offer physical distributions, hardware manufacturers would be under more pressure not to limit the production of drives that can read them. Now the consumer is made responsible for applying that pressure themselves -- for instance I insist on getting disc and floppy drives with all computers -- but that is less effective and more expensive for the consumer.

I fear you are confusing cause and effect here.

As the average performance of Internet connections increased, so did the number of sales of digital versions of games, even when there was still a physical version available for practically every game.

This resulted in practically all games soon becoming available in both physical and digital versions. As a result, sales of the physical versions decreased.

As players could now play virtually any of their games anywhere, without CD / DVD, sales of CD / DVD drives dropped.

As a result, CD / DVD and floppy drives became much unnecessary cost factors and lost their status as standard PC components. Since these drives are no longer a standard, it is hardly profitable for game manufacturers to sell their games including physical discs.

Even if all game manufacturers offered their games again including physical disks, this would not change anything, since the vast majority of gamers would not use them anyway and would therefore not buy drives or consider them again as a selling point for computers.

Blu Ray drives are not uncommon because games are not sold as Blu Ray Disc, but because it is more convenient to get the data from the Internet where it is always up to date and available everywhere.

If you want disk drives to become common again, you would have to ensure that the average performance of the Internet connections drops so that the data is no longer quickly available.

Personally, I doubt that this is possible without destroying existing society and causing the death of millions of people, and I don't think that would be an appropriate course of action.

I fear you may have misunderstood what I meant when I said it cuts both ways: This all very true. Though drives became less necessary, while not becoming drastically cheaper to manufacture, they are still very worthy PC components. Software developers (as well as online movies and TV series) are responsible for this decrease in popularity though. If they kept producing discs (whether this could be made financially interesting, is a different matter), then that would incentivize hardware manufacturers to keep including drives.
This has not happened, so the full weight of incentivizing hardware manufacturers has fallen on the consumer, who has to insist on his own that they want drives included. The consumer is, of course, in a much less good position to effectively apply such pressure.

I fear you may well be correct that a ridiculous amount of marketing would be necessary to bring disc drives to the attention of the kid gamer (compare trying to sell records or cassettes), since they have become completely conditioned into ignorance. I'd like to see someone do a study on this.
But regardless of cost and feasibility, wouldn't it be worth it? No internet dependence. No interference with software by means of 'patches' and 'updates'. No way for games to collect your private data. Games would actually have to be finished and tested before being released. Etc. If you could just bring this to the attention of people, I think there might be more interest in drives than either of us imagines.

Do you realize that this sentence is nonsense, unless the implication is that instead of a disc it contains a USB stick/floppy disks/cartridge/stack of punch cards/etc.?

Any retailer that offers you a "Physical version" of a game that does not contain a physical copy of the code is almost literally selling you a bill of goods.

Yes, but ever since the introduction of the CD-ROM drive, the only reason that the majority of PC users installed an optical drive was in order to play games.

It's true that the refusal of "publishers" to pay the Blu-ray licensing fee resulted in the present chicken-and-egg situation of hardly any PCs containing Blu-ray drives, but if just one highly-anticipated game were offered on Blu-ray, the number of installed drives would significantly increase. I have a very fast Web connection, but I would finally install a Blu-ray drive if C2077 were offered in a weighty box that was just as lovingly put together as that of The Witcher: Enhanced Edition. And many people who have much slower connections would purchase in order to avoid a 20-50 hour download.

That said, I see no reason why boxed copies can't include a cheap 64 or 128GB USB stick as mentioned above. When purchased in bulk lots of 100,000+, the per-unit price shouldn't be more than a couple of dollars. And forgive me for suggesting this, but if included in a TW:EE-quality package, I think it possible that people may pay an extra $5--maybe $10 max--considering the novelty of something that is otherwise extinct in the present age.

that's very true what you said about the usb stick. i've never understood why the industry as a whole hasn't moved toward them. it'd be easy to lock the .exe on the stick with a code that gets confirmed by internet connection, multi-factor authentication, something. that way a usb with say, 128GB, can handle the game's own size and additional updates without necessarily bloating the console or pc hard drive (except for saves and drivers). and the tech saved on consoles by getting rid of optical drives???
especially as games get bigger (wasn't days gone 100GB? wasn't rdr2 up there as well?) discs and on board storage gotta find a new solution. not every pc has an optical drive, blu ray or not; mine surely doesn't. but i do have 6 usb ports and the ps4 comes with 2. it's standard practice. and i'd love a retro-futuristic cyberpunk 2020/2077 themed usb stick. angular and yellow with a little rgb action.

how is this not a thing yet?????

Digital distribution on PC became popular earlier than Blu-Ray drives did. That's why even when the physical version has the disk(s) it's a DVD.

I also have a question about the physical copy - since its a GOG code will it come with these extra GOG goodies listed at the bottom of the Cyberpunk page? Want the stuff that comes with a physical copy but also hoping to get these extra wallpapers

Games are big these days, even console discs are basically just there to act as a license they don't don't really hold the game anymore. That went out the window with the Xbox One/PS4 generation.

Unfortunate but expected that the game is download only. Quite a hassle for people with bad internet like myself