We will own the games we purchase digitally if we change the laws to say that we own them. We've reached the point where politicians are talking about this issue, and I suppose support for copyright reform will only continue to grow.

TBH, 100% offline gaming has been problematic since day-one patches became the norm in the PS3 era. Sure, you might be play version 1.0 of the game from the disc, but often the experience was pretty compromised without the patch, often very buggy, or sometimes even features missing.

And the PS5 is meant to be able to play digitally downloaded while disconnected (at least the ones you own, not the PS+ games). It's just the implementation is little buggy, it sometimes breaks for some people and you get a bunch of vocal people complaining about how it doesn't work.

So IMO, you aren't losing much there. The digital-only experience isn't that different from needing to have internet to download a day-one patch.

It's the used game sales that are the biggest loss from this move.

I remember getting some Gran Turismo game for my PS3 back in the day, having to wait for it to slowly copy XX gigabytes of data to the hard drive, then being stupid enough to want to start the game while being online which meant having to download once more the exact same number of gigabytes (hello, incremental patches?) over an even slower Wi-Fi connection. I bought the game on a Saturday afternoon and was looking forward to it, but by the time I got to play it, it was Sunday.

So I figured that the last console with which I really felt like I had a collection of games that were mine, that I got to keep and could play whenever I wanted, was the PS2.

This is the reason the PS2 is having a resurgence in popularity. With FreeMcBoot and TB of storage you can backup your entire collection and play it at your convenience. There are a non-trivial number of PS3 games that are basically unplayable unless they get patched. With digital storefronts getting shut down left and right there is no guarantee that the disc will yield anything valuable, it's basically a paperweight.

>We won't own games anymore

Some of us do because we only buy from non-DRM encumbered platforms like GoG.

Don't buy games on steam, windows store, apple store, etc.

Stop giving companies money for something you don't own.

> I'm curious whether Nintendo will be following the same path.

Probably, they're already heavily invested in digital-only games, e.g. virtual console, or selling game boxes with just a download code.

But this goes back years already, physical copies of their games have remained expensive for ages. Relatively modern and/or very common "everyone has these" games like various pokemon games going for full price to 2-3x that.