> that ultimately costs the customer the same
But it hardly ever does. Physical games generally cost the customer less - even after taking gold point earning into account - because there's far more competition between retailers for physical, and also because after a while they want more shelf/warehouse space for new products.
For example, Dragon Quest Builders is a $50 game. That means that you get 250 gold points for buying it digitally, or 50 for buying it physically - a difference of 200 gold points.
You can currently get Dragon Quest Builders on Amazon for $44.60. That's a discount of $5.39, which is equivalent to the discount you'd get by spending 539 gold points on it.
By buying physically, you've already had more than 2.5 times the discount that you would have earned for buying it digitally.
Not to mention that if you want to, you can lend or re-sell your games, whereas digital buyers can't. (And Nintendo essentially lose a sale whenever someone re-sells their game, or someone doesn't buy it because they were satisfied just to borrow it, when they would have been willing to buy at full price if those options hadn't been available.)
As a buyer of physical games, you're really not the one getting screwed over, here.
You can pre-order Dragon Quest Heroes I + II on Amazon already.
I looked on Amazon and it looks like there is a physical copy https://www.amazon.com/Dragon-Quest-Builders-Nintendo-Switch/dp/B01NASEX0C/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_63_t_0?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=RZKACKG7DDG862Y5DN7A
Dragon Quest Heros 1 & 2 from amazon US
you can preorder from amazon & will be released on PS4 Apr 28
No. Unless there's something I'm missing here?
Builders is getting a physical release in the west, and it's actually coming out a few weeks before the Japanese version.
It's sort of a weird situation. It's not officially announced for North America (or Europe) at this time, but during the Switch event they never specified "in Japan" like they did for X and XI.
It's not listed on Nintendo's Switch product slate for the West, nor has Square Enix said anything about it outside of Japan. Yet, despite all of that, some retailers do still have pre-order links for it:
My guess is that it is in fact coming (the work is basically done, so there's really no reason not to) but Square Enix is (understandably) trying to stay silent on the matter until Heroes 2's PS4 launch is out of the way.