Indeed. I was in college in the Napster heyday, where basically everyone was downloading GBs of music for free, with the flimsiest of justifications: "Record companies are evil," or "the artists don't get that much of a cut anyway," or "I don't have the money to buy it, so it's not a sale they would have had anyway." The record label industry responded by randomly suing people--from kids to grandmas, in an effort to curb this. It turned the industry on its head a bit and shifted toward anti-consumer for a while there, until you could start legally buying DRM-free downloadable music. Today, we can pay a subscription to play whatever we want, but we also forfeit any sort of ownership rights. If the songs disappear or get remixed, well, that's what you get. Will the game industry head this direction? In many ways, it has. A game disc is only really good as a transferable license, since you'll be downloading updates immediately after inserting the disc. Most PC games aren't transferable at all, though it's been a long time since that was even possible with the CDkey approach.
I think we're seeing a market imbalance in a mature gaming industry. Developers are dumping tons of money into a new title, but the price can only go up so much before people pass at it. It's even worse when an AAA title flops. We see it with studios getting bought, closed, or downsized. Microtransactions were proposed, but now those have been met with customer and legal scrutiny. Free to Play is another approach, but such games can be a massive money pit. I actually have some long-term concerns about the heath of the gaming industry. It feels like it's unsustainable right now, despite the billions of dollars getting passed around. It's all consolidating into a handful of really large companies that have to stay in the black. Axing an underperforming game studio doesn't mean much to them. While that sounds ruthless, anything that makes less than it consumes is unsustainable.
