Mid-2023, I made a slap-dash video regarding my thoughts about an announcement from Limited Run Games. The event made me look back on a lot of my physical collection of media: music, books, and obviously video games.
I was - and still am - a collector of all these types of media, but there has no doubt been a noticeable trend in cheapening the formats of art we seek as collectors. This often defeats the purpose of retaining a physical copy of the media in the wake of a digital-dominant landscape, when the alternative is often the true essence of the product.
Gone are the days of liner notes, manuals, or prefaces, save for the releases given a commercial budget. Even those leave little guarantee for a quality package. As for independent releases, which may choose to remain intentionally minimal in their presentation, I find the artists who I purchase an album from, for example, to all use the same manufacturer - One that supplies a cheap digipack with visibly compressed images printed to the front and back, generic fonts detailing the credits, track listing, lyrics, etc.
For an indie artist, it makes sense that a major budget is not going into the pressing of CDs, when it's a practical matter of throwing WAV files onto a plastic disc so one can rip the files again, set it upon their shelf, and refuse to look at it again until it's time to move or downsize.