I can't claim to be a full expert on it but here's how it basically works:
All of the time consuming materials get sent out to manufacturing weeks, months in advance.
That's one reason why modern manuals suck so bad (and Elemental's manual is going to suck out of the box, sorry I wish it wasn't so but it's already outdated based on ideas from my friends online and such). The manual was sent out back before Beta 3.
...
Anyway...
The box design and other stuff get sent out long in advance.
Then, starting 30 days out, you start sending out release candidates. These are the "just in case" builds (IMO they harken back from the days when developers would have a catastrophic hard drive failure and they were screwed). So you send weekly RCs to the manufacturer with the knowledge that you have a particular date that they must go to manufacturing.
In our case, manufacturing is supposedly on the 14th and is literally done in 24 hours of the DVD. Then they assemble the pieces and send them to a warehouse as well as direct to retailers where they'll likely start getting them mid next week where they are SUPPOSED to wait until the streeet date to make them on sale.
It's all a very nerveracking for us because we always run up against the last second. Thus, it was key to Fed Ex weekend ship that DVD early today to make sure it gets to whereever they make the DVDs by tomorrow.
Funny story on this:
Back in 1995, the OS/2 version of Galactic Civilizations 2 was 1 day late and so the previous RC was used. Back then I was a lot younger and a lot more hot headed and I got so pissed off I had the entire manufacturing run tossed out (they had to open up all the boxes, replace the CD, reshrink them with the "gold" version). The retailers were not happy (I remember being on the phone with Jeff Smith, the main buyer from CompUSA back then, begging not to drop us) since it caused a week delay. Luckily, Jeff was originally from Michigan (CompUSA was based in Dallas Texas) not far from where I live and I'm originally from Texas (not far from where he worked) so I had a good relationship with him.
Anyway, behind the scenes, the logistics of retail is considerable. My friends who work at bigger studios say it's a lot different there. There, it's all done months in advance because the release of a game is not dictated based on when it's done but rather based on quarterly financial reports (i.e. public stock price).
In a tiny company like Stardock, release dates are based on when the game is "done" and not a minute later or earlier. In a larger private company, it's typically decided by marketing considerations. In a public company, it's based on stock pricing considerations. In well run companies (like Blizzard, Valve, Bethesda - to name 3), that means the games are typically done long before they go to manufacturing and it's all about polish.
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Late next week, the reviewers will start getting "code" for the game. In all likelyhood, that "code" will be some version that's post-gold but pre-day 0 (an interim build) because even we won't get DVDs in time to get them out to reviewers and, as a practical matter, we'd get shot by the media if we sent them pieces of plastic (DVDs) to put into their drives to install nowadays. And based on the stats for Sins and Demigod, over 95% of sold retail copies end up updating to the day 0 version and beyond.
Speaking of installs...
I've timed it -- Elemental installs *faster* off a good cable modem connection than from a local DVD (mainly because of the idiotic way Windows handles transfering tiny files and Elemental is roughly 12,000 files).
