given your typing skills tonight I hope its not on your "to-do" list! ;)

Yeah, in the future "DRM" will be irrelevant since everything will be streamed anyway. We're in what will someday be seen as an awkward transition period between discs and streams.

If you want to get technical, games you buy on Steam aren't even yours to own. As such, if there even is a way to back up your Steam games, if the developers or Valve removed the game, your possession of the files is techncially illegal.

Among many, many other pluses for GOG, you own what you buy here. That's what's so beautiful about being DRM-free. When you spend money on something here, you own it eternally, even if GOG were to close as a company (provided that you backed up the installers).

Thats a pretty far flung future considering the state of net infrastructure across the globe.
thats a big load of poo yer talkin

Please stick to making points with actual facts. https://support.apple.com/guide/music/intro-to-the-itunes-store-mus3e2346c2/mac "All songs offered by the iTunes Store come without Digital Rights Management (DRM) protection. These DRM-free songs, called iTunes Plus, have no usage restrictions and feature high-quality, 256 kbps AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) encoding." It's just standard AAC files that work anywhere. No registering. It's not like Steam in any way.

I remember when registration was optional. (Name? Address? Phone number? Bank details?)

I remember when buying something meant owning it. (I can play it or break it or trade it or burn it.)

I remember playing games without anyone else knowing. (Logging forever and analysing behaviour.)

This is the dystopian future that I was afraid of.

steam (off my sh*t) is primarily interested in harvesting data, advertising. Gamers are 'cattle'.

Give them your details (your testicles) and don't be surprised when you feel the squeeze.

That hasn't stopped streaming video taking over, which has similar bandwidth requirements. They'll happily write-off people living in super rural areas for all the benefits streaming brings them.

There's a HUGE difference between video and streaming a game. In first case no one cares about latency and no one really looking into minor details in the picture so minor compression artefacts isn't a big deal. Even if you have rather crappy connection you can get away with video precaching for about 30-40 seconds then streaming ahead while you'll be at the middle of that cached chunk.

Now for games - your client sends data to the server, server processes, replies and sends video data. Which adds insane amount of delay. Now imagine it's a versus game - everything doubles. And that's in perfect condition - everyone got 1Gbps internet and lives close to the server. We all know how laggy MMORPGs usually are and those don't stream video and doesn't require insane amounts of bandwidth. It's just a delay between client and server plus server getting overloaded quite often. In case of streaming theres also well... delay added by video streaming. I laughed hard when SNK released latest Samurai Shodown on Stadia before releasing it on actual PC, how will you even play it with input lag about 300ms? It's a game where every frame matters and delay more than 10 frames is pretty much unplayable, ideally it should be under 5. Now then there's quality problem. You can't expect cloud gaming service to stream at least Blu-ray
and many games have a LOT of tiny text. Not to mention that not many people will be willing to play for "1080p-4k" quality that actually looks more like 720p.
I tried Steam home streaming thing and other similar things. They looked rather meh even between two desktops connected with 10Gbps LAN.
That's why most cloud gaming services that don't offer access to 1000+ games for a small monthly fee failed miserably.
Who will want to pay a LOT for inferior experience.

Like stillborn Stadia where Google had the audacity to ask full price for games you don't own at all and even with subscription fee on top of that (later they dropped it but still... talk about greed bigger than universe).

Game streaming won't be even close to real hardware gaming in the next 60+ years. Because to eliminate delay we'll need some kind of FTL transmission methods. We don't even know how to do that in theory. Hell, even warp drives are possible in the realm of hard science theories but there's nothing much about possibility of communications faster than radio/optical.
And just to get picture quality on par with what video card outputs to your display when streaming video we'll need trunks that more thick than what providers use for the whole city with population of 1.5M people. Something along the lines of 1Tbit/s at home. It took more than 30 years to get from 10Mbit/s to 1-10Gbit/s even for just LANs. So it will take at very least 15-20 years for home internet to get 100 times faster.

If I recall right that wasn't always the case for Itunes stores.. I could be wrong though as its been quite some time sense I used any music service like that for varies reasons .. But ya just saying that could be a updated guildline from a change in service scenerio you are mentioning rather then how it was prior.. But again I could be misremembering

I'm obviously not advocating for streaming games, or saying it has no downsides. When you say "X is surely the future" everyone assumes you're excited about it, I'm not. However services like Stadia and Xbox Whatever only require a relatively low 25Mbps to function, and reviews mostly say the performance is "fine" or even good. Most of Stadia's mainstream reviews focused more on its crappy business model than any technical negative.

Whether enthusiasts like us like it or not, streaming is the future of everything. Only question is how long it takes for everything else to vanish, which is hopefully a long time.

Yes, I already said that. It briefly had DRM, many years ago. Back when the original iPod was a thing.

Yeah, unfortunately the perceived convenience will override everything else, once enough people have "good enough" internet for it to mostly work, and there is some kind of Netflix model (pay $10-$15/month, have access to thousands of games). Yes, the video quality will never be as good, and yes there will always be input lag, and sure you won't own anything. Games will probably come and go like TV shows/movies already do. Modding would have to be significantly more restricted than it currently is.

But "I don't have to download anything!" (never mind the actual data you download over time will outstrip even the largest game sizes), "I don't need high-end hardware!", and "I don't need to pay $60 for the latest games!" will cause streaming to take over, probably sooner than you think. The only hope is that there will be enough of an enthusiast audience left to make proper releases of at least some games still viable. If not, all the more reason to add to our backlogs now while we still can.

The chances of anyone actually being prosecuted for it are virtually zero but because you don't own the games you buy on Steam, it would be considered illegal if you maintained access to the files after legal avenues of leasing the game have been removed.

I made the wrong example, turns out i misplaced some text, the parts that tell about downloaded music not working etc etc is found in the how to use the downloaded music from a subscription explanation and not actually owned music which is of course pretty obvious.

High Quality btw is very debatable btw with for example the soundtrack for Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order only available in something that seems to be mp3 format

But that's where they get you: you don't technically own a single product you buy on Steam or any DRM-based platform. You're only ever leasing the rights to the games. In other words, Steam is royally screwing everyone over and very few people realize it. That's why, if GOG made it easier for me to buy from them by starting GOG wallet cards sold in retail stores like Steam does, I'd buy exclusively from them whenever it's possible.