Even as digital game sales are slowly gaining on physical discs, GameStop Corp CEO Paul Raines believes that discs will never really go away, and GameStop will continue to sell them.

“Disc-based games will be around forever,” Raines said in a recent interview with Fortune. “The market has seen physical music sales down 50 percent from its peak and physical movie sales down 60 percent from its peak, but even in a doomsday scenario, disc-based games will be around for a long time. I see a complimentary business where we sell discs plus download like the current console mode. Virtual reality games will also likely follow this model.”

GameStop reaffirmed its fondness for physical discs earlier last month when it refused to offer consoles bundle deals that come with digital unlock codes rather than physical game copies. The company argued this decision was something customers would want, but it seems pretty clear that GameStop still enjoys the revenue it gets from buying used games for almost nothing and then selling them back to consumers at inflated prices.

“Consumers have a pretty strong preference on this,” Raines said in an earnings call at the time. “Consumers prefer those physical bundles because they know that that disc has value in the trade-in program at GameStop. So we choose not to participate in the digital bundles.”

Later in the same call, GameStop COO Tony Bartel added, “Obviously, GameStop’s preference is, we sell things at full price and provide great value through our trade program and that we have physical discs.”

Whether or not physical games are good for consumers, they certainly seem to be good for GameStop. As digital download services like Steam, Xbox Live, and PlayStation Network take on a larger role in game sales, physical storefronts like GameStop are facing an increasingly difficult challenge in getting customers through the door.

That is one reason that GameStop is once again offering to buy back used game consoles dating all the way back to the original Nintendo Entertainment System.

Photo by stan