I do think it's possible that streaming game services and what you are talking about wind up a little different. I could imagine that streaming game services could spin up and down servers more dynamically depending on demand. There would be a lot of motivation to do this in a more automated fashion than regular game studios because the streaming service will be dealing with 1000's of titles not just a handful. I think generally you keep your saved game info locally and then it is fed to a server which starts you at the appropriate place? I'm making a lot of assumptions but I do think the basis of my argument 1000's of titles vs ~10 is a pretty good reason to think this won't be handled in the same way.

Also, games like GTA V have been supported for a crazy amount of time. Transitioned into online play. People have probably gotten 1000's of hours of gameplay from a $60 purchase. I play things like fallout and minecraft so I also get a huge gameplay time to cost ratio, so I'm not very sensitive to this from my personal experience.