Dear Future Gamer

I always thought that the reason PC game boxes were so big (FG37) is that they used to come on quite a number of floppy disks and would have needed a lot of documentation about installation, etc. Nowadays we have 650-odd times the memory of one floppy on a disc only a little bit physically bigger, but publishers haven't bothered to redesign the standard packaging.

I found it annoying to take home James Bond 007: The Ultimate Dossier (£7.99? Barg!) and find within the cavernous box a huge moulded plastic insert with a single double-CD case sitting in it. The manual was even the CD-inlay!

I only have three PC games (the others being Quake and SimCity 2000 SE, both also budget titles... God, I'm cheap) and I don't know where to store the boxes in amongst all my CDs, videos, old LPs, N64 games and PlayStation games.

Pat Shields

FG: We've touched on this several times in Future Gamer, but to say again, a lot of the thinking behind really big and useless boxes is what's called 'perceived value'. If it's big and shiny it means it's worth more and the game's going to be better. Crap, isn't it? But that's marketing for you.