AYou're pulling shit out of your ass here.
Sure, back in the days, the physical cost was relatively high compared to production cost. On one hand, you had huge boxes, manuals of easily ten times as large as modern games, sometimes a fancy map, a bunch of floppies...quite a lot compared to the fysical stuff nowadays. On the other hand, game creating teams were small. Just take a look at game credits of those games and compare them to today's games.
With prices remaining more or less the same, despite these changes, it doesn't take a genius to see that the cost shifted towards the actual CREATING of the game, right?
You're calling it an insult to the customer when physical copies cost the same as digital ones. Have you even considered the other side of that argument? If they weren't the same...it would mean that people without large internet connections would be discriminated against. And putting the blame on the game developers is also stupid: they already pay for all the physical copies, whether they're bought or not. Putting the internet copy up for cheaper means that less people will buy the phyisical one...which makes it a cost for the company (as said: they have to pay manufacturing costs).
But even then...that's not really correct, is it? I was going to say "have you never heard of steam? Or indie games?"... but you rant about the latter in the rest of the post. Anyway: steam often IS cheaper than the physical copy. Not straight from the start, since it would hurt the sales of the physical copies. But there are plenty of sales so you can beat physical prices.
As for indie games...they do exactly what you want. They have a comparable team size as to "back in the day", and they charge less because there's no manufacturing cost. So I don't really get your rant at all.
Do you want AAA games to be made with a team as small as indie games or something?
B
ps:
C
D