WryFlavoredBread: So basically, I want to exert my rights as consumer and not subject myself to a life based on "services", but at the same time, am I just rejecting change? Is ownership really meaningless nowadays? (I understand that we do not truly "own" anything, but if someone wants to come to my house and take my collection of albums so be it.)
Ownership isn't meaningless in that you can still own most CD's, DVD's & Blu-Ray's, books, etc, in spite of Netflix, Spotify & Amazon's success. As you said, streaming is best for discovering what to watch and "throwaway" movies. For classics / favorites you want to rewatch in future, there's no substitute for having a collection under your own control. Modern gaming however, is the most anti-consumer out of all entertainment mediums though with ownership of physical discs restricted to pre-2010 games, and only a few select "digital" stores that sell DRM-Free offline installers of newer games. Really you have to decide what your priority is. If you want the latest AAA multi-player games, they pretty much are all DRM'd one way or another. If you prefer older / single player games and modern Indie's, it's still possible to own most of what you want. Personally I've reached the point where if PC gaming completely goes down the toilet over the next few years, eg, streaming replacing purchasing en masse, GOG disappears on the midst of the "store wars", pay2win, becoming even more "normalized", etc, I've got a large enough existing collection of games that I'll just ditch buying future PC games altogether, buy a couple of cheap spare backup CPU's / motherboards / GPU's, and stick to offline classic gaming (like many here, I have far more games than hours per day to play them).
Crosmando: I'll be downrated for this, but for any media which doesn't have a DRM-free version, the closest you'll get to real ownership is pirating it and then backing it up on a secondary harddrive.
+1. Nope, you ended up "high rated" instead just for speaking the truth, when the only way of getting even legally owned copy-protected disc games to work on Microsoft
"we blocked SecuRom & SafeDisc +15 years too late" Windows 10 is to source a "NoCD". Some of these games have been re-released on GOG, but many others have not. As for piracy, I'm not gonna promote that in general, but it is pretty sad when certain "abandonware" sites do a better job of long-term game preservation than legal ones, or that some people only resort to pirating games then legally buying the ones they want afterwards purely due to lack of downloadable playable demo's, all whilst publishers continue to head in the wrong direction in responding to that...