Irrelevant Containers

Like most young adult males, I've been playing video games for a long time.  I was first introduced to them on the computer when parents, far from believing them to lead to violent, lazy kids, thought that they were a great educational tool.  I started off playing games like Math Blasters and Gizmos and Gadgets.  These games all had one thing in common: they required a disk to run.  Not only did the disk install a significant amount of data on my pc, but they were also required to be in the disk drive in order to play the game at all.  This to me was just part of the reality of playing a game.  You inserted the disk and away you went.

They even include an image of a CD on the cover so you know what you're getting

The gaming industry has made significant progress since those day, not least of which is making video games more fun for the kids and less appealing to their parents.  Additionally, they have developed digital distribution.  You no longer have to purchase the physical disks to play the game, you can just download them.  For the most part, this has just been an alternate format, a convenience for people with fast internet connections and closets already overflowing with CDs. 

Fortunately, I have not had either of these problems and for various reasons prefer to purchase physical copies of the games I want to play ( I blame Morty Maxwell for conditioning me to believe that disks are necessary, clearly his true nefarious scheme the whole time).  So, when the time came for me to purchase my most recent computer game, Rome 2 Total War, I bought the physical copy, which was completely redundant.  The physical copy acted as nothing more than a product key to enable me to download the game from Steam, a digital distribution software run by Valve.  The disk that I bought did not actually contain the game I wanted to play, it just granted me access to it.  I had previously managed to avoid Steam, but was now forced to create an account in order to play a game I had already bought.

Thanks a lot for making me subscribe to your free service Valve

In the end, there was no real harm done, I can still play the game normally.  Instead of being tied down to the disk, the game is tied to my Steam account.  I just bought a completely useless CD to add to my collection when I could have just bought the game through Steam directly.