I agree with you wholeheartedly, however, even buying physical games nowadays is a meaningless practice (one that I still do, mind you, physical over digital, that’s me any day). But with the sheer amount of updates, online checks, DLCs and whatnots, our physical media is nothing more than a pretty case to display on the shelves. They can pull the plug on all of that nowadays just as easily as any digital media.

The ideal solution would be an industry-wide change where games should always be required to be able to play as sold on disc—pipe dream though.

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.