[xg15]

You're aware that DVDs are older than Netflix and MP3s are older than Spotify?

They absolutely used to be preservable until an enormous technological effort was made to make them non-preservable. The amount of people curating their CD (or later MP3) collections showed they cared very much.

> If you really love a certain movie or song/album, you will buy it separately. Why not the same with games?

Because it's not clear at all that this option would still exist. From a publisher's perspective, it's vastly preferable to just sell access to your game and keep the actual binary under wraps. So if there is a way how they could realistically do that, I don't think there will be much motivation to also offer the game as standalone software.

Or, to be more precise, you'll able to "buy" the game alright, but what you're buying is just access to the game on a streaming service, not an actual copy.

[cookiecaper]

> Or, to be more precise, you'll able to "buy" the game alright, but what you're buying is just access to the game on a streaming service, not an actual copy.

Which, to be fair, is also the desired effect of something like Steam. If Valve turns off your account, you lose access to all the games you've bought.

The last resort of tricking the DRM to retain access to the stuff you "own" is only possible due to the technical limitations that mandate distribution of the files to a user's local system. I'm sure publishers would love to be able to just stream blobs, making this type of thing much more difficult.