Honkai Star Rail, a free-to-play gacha game (basically, gambling game of chance) in which players spend anywhere from $5 to $10,000 to get characters, gear, equipment... is now releasing a disc version of their game on PlayStation 5. First issue with this is that many people don't have a disk drive in their PlayStation, and the new PS5 pro won't either. The game is also downloaded to the PlayStation store digitally anyway, so I'm not even sure what the heck the disk supposed to be for. Second, it doesn't appear to be a steelbook, just a regular old plastic PS5 game case from what I have read from other sources. This is incredibly wasteful and frustrating because these always end up in a landfill anyway. Third and finally, it appears that the things that you get in game are silly little cosmetics. Spending money on this doesn't actually get you any characters. It's not like Apex Legends where you buy the starter bundle and you get several characters to start off with, no. You get nothing, absolutely nothing to help you in game. But if you take that $40 and go in game and spend it on rolling for overpowered characters, you could definitely get one of the best characters in the game right now.
Just seems very strange to me that a free to play pay to win game is going to come out with a physical copy that doesn't provide any actual benefit to players in their gameplay.
It depends on how you spend it. The best bang for the buck top-up pack - the $99 one - works out to about 20 pulls per $40 (this includes first-time purchase bonus). If you spent your $40 on the $5 monthly subscription (and logged in every day to claim it) it would work out to 160 pulls for your $40 - but it would take you 8 months to claim.