New concept idea.

So I have been noticing a trend of games coming without any sort of physical instruction manual. As someone who is an avid collector it bugs me that some games do this and others do not because it makes it difficult when buying games second hand not knowing if it is supposed to have a manual or not.

I was thinking about making a concept for physical games that do not contain physical manuals. I have no idea if this is something I should pursue or what to name it so I thought I would look for some feedback from you fine wiki folks.

Boxed Copy, No Manual?

The problem with this idea is that there are varying degrees of it. There are games that just have a tiny thing that tells you what the controls are and some legal bullshit (Valve games have done this forever), does that count as a manual?

How do you classify games like Shogun: Total War? It didn't come with a manual, but you could mail in an order to get a physical version sent to you. (Which was complete bullshit on its own, but hey!)

Hmmmm, interesting idea but here's the problem I see with it. Multiple releases of the same game may have differing states of manual inclusion. And those releases are all tagged to the same page usually, which means this concept gets tagged to a page and releases where it may not 100% apply.

e.g. the old King's Quest games, totally came with a paper manual. But if you buy the digital version on GoG all you get a PDF of the old manual.

Also since Paper Manuals are probably a dieing art and going forward manual-less is likely the new de facto standard, perhaps it would make more sense to have a concept page for paper manuals instead of a concept of games without one.

Either way I would not want to be the person who has to tag tens of thousands of games with either of these new possible concepts.

You could run into the problem where a game like League of Legends exists entirely online (they did sell a boxed copy but let's say they didn't) but may present a manual online in some fashion. Maybe a blog post created and linked to that describes some basics of the game.

Would that count towards a manual or does it need to be something physical?

@finaldasa: I was thinking physical only releases with physical only manuals.