Make sure it is working but then ideally try to behave as if it wasn't just in case.
Mainly because only a tiny percentage of a tiny percentage (physical media buyers) of the user base would do that so it is not worth developing a solution for it.
Honestly makes sense since you can then produce the boxes much earlier and ship them and go through all that physical distribution nonsense without worrying about patching from whatever is on disk to the actual finished product. Especially since I bet physical gamers want the game on day one too.
It is and always has been only licensing with physical media too.
In my experience cranking one aspect (like graphics) up to 11 in terms of realism just makes all the other things that aren't realistic even more glaringly obvious in an effect sort of similar to the uncanny valley or to the way suspension of disbelief is harder to achieve in a movie that takes itself too seriously.
The assumption that you need amazing graphics for immersion is deeply flawed. We have had decades of people immersed in e.g. RPGs with very minimal graphics or even text only interfaces.
Virtual worlds are affected by similar problems. If you look at e.g. Second Life, a relatively established one you will quickly realize it has all kinds of users with relatively minimal spec systems and use it in all kinds of contexts where they also do other stuff (e.g. work, watching kids,...). But people who try to build new ones tend to try to build them as VR which is completely useless to that entire user base because they can't afford a system that runs VR and also won't work in situations where you need to do other stuff at the same time.
Maybe what we need is more analysis and fewer visionaries.
Well, more like after the mid 90s or so. Movie theaters were pretty much shit from the moment when home audio started to allow you to use more than just stereo.
Kind of but it is also only needed at compile time, the dependencies are not used at runtime, instead everything is compiled and statically linked into the executable.
Movie theaters always seemed like such weird places to go to in general. I mean I get it if you go with a large friend group or to see a movie that has a lot of large scale scenes but for pretty much everything else it has literally zero advantages to make up for its major downsides.
Other people being noisy, no ability to pause, shitty audio quality due to bad placement, expensive tickets and food, having to go there and having to be there at a specific time, usually not being able to watch the movie in the original audio even when you do speak the language, pre-movie ads,...
People always talk about it as this great experience but I feel there is a reason they have to put the movies in there first because otherwise very few people would be willing to suffer through it all.
To be fair it is probably not on purpose. He is just too stupid to make realistic estimates of what will be possible.
A lot of digital games can be sold for a cheaper "full price" than physical ones ever could though because of the inherent costs of the inefficient physical distribution network.