>>148350756>Yeah, for publishers.And consumers.
Want to track down a copy of a snes or nes game? Good luck spending a week searching local stores. And you'd have to bid on ebay or elsewhere for any kind of relatively rare game. Expect to pay 60 dollars.
With digital the issue of finite copies is NEVER an issue. You can buy games from the 90's from Steam or GoG or anywhere else right now. Sales are also great because they allow a new generation of people to experience games they might have missed out on. I saw a few threads of people playing the Thief games on /v/ after they went on sale. I had almost never seen any threads about those games before. It's win-win. Publishers get some money, and the consumer pays 2 dollars (if it's on sale) to experience a great old game.
The only issues might be if, hypothetically Valve dissolves and your HDD crashes. How would you replace your games? Gaben has said he'd offer a site to give out cd keys and possibly the full games, but I'm not sure if that is 100% reliable.
Picking up physical copies of old games should be something that obsessive collectors do. They're neat, and should be cherished but they're history. Old technology.