Physical editions of major games increasingly arrive without the game on them. The box contains a code. That has become normal enough that it barely draws comment, and it is worth pausing on what it changes.
What you are buying
A code is a licence, not a copy. It can be redeemed once, tied to one account, and cannot be lent, resold, or handed down. The physical object is packaging around a permission.
For most buyers most of the time, this is invisible. You redeem, you download, you play. The difference only surfaces at the edges: when you want to sell the game, when the account is lost, when the storefront eventually closes.
The preservation problem
Games that exist only as licences on active storefronts are one business decision away from being unplayable. Storefronts do close. Publishers do delist titles when music or likeness rights expire. When that happens with a disc-based game, the discs still work. When it happens with a code-based one, the game is simply gone for anyone who did not already download it.
This is not hypothetical. Substantial parts of the last two console generations are already effectively unavailable through legitimate means.
Why publishers prefer it
No manufacturing, no distribution, no shipping, no unsold inventory, and no second-hand market competing with new sales. The margin difference is large and the operational simplification is larger.
The resale point is the one publishers rarely say out loud, but it is the most consequential. A used-game market transfers value between players with nothing going back to the publisher, and eliminating it has been an industry goal since the first online activation.
What a buyer can reasonably do
Download what you own rather than relying on the storefront to have it later. Keep hardware that can run what you care about. And be aware that a digital library is a set of permissions with a term nobody has told you.
The realistic position
Digital distribution is not going away, and it has real advantages – no shelf space, no scratched discs, patches on day one. The argument is not against it. It is for keeping some path that survives a storefront being switched off, which is a thing that has happened before and will happen again.