Counter-argument: I have a Steam account associated with a day 1 purchase of Half Life 2 (so, 25 years or so). Every game I've ever purchased is still available for me to download, while I lost probably 50% or more of my physical games collection.

If I'm renting those games, it sure seems like a good deal.

I do appreciate that console online market places have not historically been as well managed as Steam.

But also, GoG exists: you can buy a PC game and get a DRM-free download that you can play offline and store forever.

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.

---

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.