I think the entire digital content stemmed from piracy & them having control and greed.. Bandwidth prob cost lot less than creating millions of disks n cases with paper.
Actually things have to be viewed the other way around: Piracy became the big problem it was in the late 90s early 2000s because the publishers were too slow to go digital. The guy from Oculus Rift recently said it right in a panel discussion on Pax about the future of PC Gaming: The number one reason for pirating back then was that for a 14,15,16 year old just downloading the game was a LOT less of a hassle than asking their parents to get them to a place to pick it up. And companies like Ubisoft just made the problem worse themselves by reacting with copy protection that could just kill your computer completely. I mean how many games needed to patch out the copy protection because it didn't prevent piracy and on top of it prevented paying customers from playing???
And even DRM is disappearing more and more. And I can tell exactly why: Because now that Amazon MP3, Itunes, Steam, GoG and whatnot are established and running mostly flawless, piracy is declining back to the levels it had in the late 80s/early 90s. Because things have turned around completely: Why in hell pirate a MP 3 with abysmal quality or pirate a game and go through the hassle of finding a trojan/virus-free download, when a legal copy is a mouse click away for less than 10$ if you just wait a little?
