People have got too used to Steam doing things well, but don't forget that: 1) that's not the norm, and 2) there's no telling when it will change. Gabe Newell will retire not too long from now. Will the next one in charge be so lenient? Don't forget what happened with Unity, for instance.

Right. License pulls happen extremely rarely for digital video games[1]

And delisting a game from a store isn't a license pull. Delisting prevents new purchases of the game, but owners of a game prior to delisting can still download and play[2]

For example, even though Sony is closing the PS3 store to new purchases after 20 years, existing owners of digital games can still download their digital copies. So my entire PSN digital library for the past 20 years is still downloadable and playable. Same for Steam.

I love GOG, and prefer a DRM-free digital copy for PC that I can backup redundantly, as it is the most future-proof option, IMO. Physical media can get damaged or lost and digital storefronts won't last forever (even Steam could shut down one day). Even my hard drives can fail and lose data. But even so, when I purchase a digital license for a game, I have good confidence it will be playable for years and years to come.

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1. Of course, many online multiplayer games have had their servers shut down, after which the game becomes effectively unplayable. But this is a separate problem that isn't solved by choosing physical over digital media.

2. As long as the digital storefront exists and as long the console hardware still works, if I purchased it for a console.

The other reason that a PC is a bit different for this is that the backwards compatibility for console generations is almost always going to be worse than the ability to run games (even if they came out on previous versions of Windows) on whatever the current OS you have installed. Plus, even when stuff doesn't work by default, you'll still likely have a much easier time modding it to get things working than on a console. For years before they re-released the older Sims games on Steam, there was forum post where someone had meticulously documented a process for working around various issues that would crop up when trying to install the Sims 3 on a modern version of Windows, and even though it was error prone and the game crashed a lot, it still worked (and tbh the game apparently just crashed a lot back in the day too, so it was arguably just being true to the original behavior).

I agree with this as a PC gamer.

Every game I have purchased on Steam still exists to be played, apart from those where multiplayer servers may have diminished naturally.

If I had these games as physical copies I'd need to have lugged around multiple boxes of games of which I'd probably have lost or damaged the disks.

Your library on steam is tied to you. When you die, it is gone. Your children or family using it is against terms of use.

Even that Nintendo Switch 2 Game-Key Card implementation still works better for parent’s game reselling use case (for a limited time) than outright removing the physical media option as Sony is doing.

From the link you posted:

“Game-key cards are different from regular game cards, because they don’t contain the full game data. Instead, the game-key card is your "key" to downloading the full game to your system via the internet.

After it’s downloaded, you can play the game by inserting the game-key card into your system and starting it up like a standard physical game card. An internet connection is only required when you launch the game for the first time. After this, the game can be started even without an internet connection. However, like regular physical software, the game-key card must be inserted into the system in order to play the game. A Nintendo Account is not required to download the game data.”

So lending and reselling game-key cards is still possible in the same way as physical media… at least until Nintendo’s servers stop serving the game, heh.

Unfortunately some switch 2 games are only available as digital download codes (e.g. Split Fiction) even though Xbox and PS5 physical versions are real discs. For now.

At least they clearly label them and make them easy to avoid!

Yeah I've seen those, and I deliberately haven't bought any games only available in that format.

They're theoretically a tiny bit better than download codes, but the same applies. If this is the format going forward, I'm out.

Even before the era where physical copies became nothing more than license keys, the copy of the game on the disk was a buggy 1.0 release that was expected to get a day one update. So if the download servers go offline, you’d never be able to download the updates to fix it.

Like GOG? Yeah, I'm a bit more accepting of those, since they're DRM free. Being able to just copy and paste from one computer to another or what not is how I feel digital games should work, and how I know they don't work on console.