This is hardly a new concept, Eve Online is a fairly prominent example of a game that is run entirely as a subscription service. I'm sure there are other MMO games that do the same, however there are others like World of Warcraft which combine a subscription service with a "boxed" game client.
In the context of the current discussion, I think EA could have made the new SimCity game entirely service based, like Eve, giving the client software as a free download and charging for access to the server, where most/all of the actual simulation logic would live. Instead they've pulled a bait-and-switch with a boxed product.
When I was talking about GaaS I was sarcastically talking about ostensibly single-player games are crippled in this way.
Crippleware is a good one too :)
I was also thinking about PC Games mainly when I said that since it still (touch wood) a rare situation.
To be honest, mobile gaming didn't even appear in my PC-master-race-gaming mind :p
Do we need a new acronym for games that required black-box server side components (Not just DRM but entire chunks of game code) not controlled by the consumer?
GaaS? (Game as a Service)?
Ubisoft did the same thing with the last silent Hunter game IIRC.