Traditionally the whole industry has been fine with it as long as direct media copying was too hard for the layperson, especially since lending games around was like word of mouth advertising.
Digital platforms change a whole bunch of these things.
Not true for PS5 games. Sony can push a firmware update to disable games, even if you own the disc.
They can delist a game from the PS store, but I doubt they would make a game unplayable if it's already installed or if you own it physically.
You can doubt that they will, but that’s just hope rather than a legal or technical guarantee.
It's not based on a legal or technical guarantee. But it's based on what Sony did in the past:
P.T. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.T._(video_game) ) was pulled from the PS store. But Sony didn't make it unplayable if it was already installed. In fact, the wikipedia article says:
> After the cancellation, PlayStation 4 consoles with P.T. installed were listed on eBay for over $1,000
But they do require certain firmware updates to play games, at least they did in the PS3 days. If you hadn't updated to that firmware (say, because you didn't want certain features you used like the OtherOS installation to be deleted) your new physical media would not play. I bought Dark Souls on a disc and could not play it on my console.
In other words, you completely missed the point that this is about DRM and not physical vs digital.
Thats not really the case. Windows Defender and other anti viruses will quarantine piracy tools (like no cd cracks, and how many cd/dvd readers are in modern computers) these days, not far from there to see them being paid to police license changes. Games are often more playable in their pirated versions. Like if you own the Fallout 3/Fallout New Vegas discs that require games for windows live you are screwed, but the digital steam versions remove that requirement.
Then you have games like Metal Fatigue, released for Windows 98, suffering memory corruption issues since Windows XP. Microsofts Compatibility Toolkit offers a fix for some of the memory issues making the game vastly more playable, but then of course, Microsoft has set an EOL date for the toolkit, the last version of it was published for Windows 10, and theres an expectation that at some point Windows 11 will not permit it to be installed any longer.
Whether you buy a disc or pay for a download, you are still at the mercy of the entire ecosystem. If you completely freeze your ecosystem and never install anything you might get by. But that presents other risks.
I just bought Kinnectimals for my toddler, and it came with a warning that it needed connectivity to some random xbox server to update, straight out of the box. Thankfully, my 360 was still able to connect to it. But network protocols might change, the OS might get a new version that bricks the connectivity (potentially for good reason, there could be a vuln) or hundreds of other things. Theres no safety or security provided to me by owning the disc.