That's actually less of a gap than I thought there would be.  I mean if you take out mobile gaming, which is huge, that 2.2B must drop to ~1B, maybe less.  Yea, physical still has quite the shelf life left, as much of that also includes DLC that would only be open to some because they bought the physical game first.

On top of the fact that you can't resell them, so every digital copy sold for a publisher is money that isn't getting passed around by other hands.

I can't find anywhere how to do it, only the opposite saying it can't be done

http://community.us.playstation.com/t5/Games-Services/transferring-my-ps4-save-data-from-one-account-to-another-on-the/td-p/45105355
http://www.mcps3download.com/download-share-minecraft-ps4-maps/ it doesn't work.

When I copy the save data to a USB stick, then switch accounts, it simply says there is no save data on the USB stick. The save data only shows up for the account I copied it from.

Perhaps it only works on ps3?

I doubt that Sony would allow that. It would invite the possibility of trophy cheating.

The promise of patching games is just something they said on interviews. It isn't on their terms of use, so it's an empty promise. I'm not even sure if they would be legally allowed to do so or if it would depend on a per-publisher agreement. So it's far from guaranteed.

As you said, the absolutely majority of games use it. As it is up to publishers, it means that once again your choice was ignored and publishers will decide what you can do with your original copies.

Yea well it really comes down to whether or not a person will trust Valve to keep their promise. I for one do trust Valve enough to do something with it because if a company uses Valve's own DRM in their game and Valve is saying they will patch it, I think it's pretty safe to assume that Valve has all the legalities checked. The question really comes into play when people buy games from steam which uses third party DRMs such as Uplay.

I do agree with the second part though. But it's not like buying physical would result in the perfect option either since the state in which many games launch in isn't exactly that good considering how many games these days have day 1 patches and etc to resolve many of the bugs and what not. So if the servers do go down, I'd say majority of physical will also have issues but granted you should be able to at least play the game depending on the bug.

You would be cracking the game. If you have to break the law to keep playing something you bought, why bother? Pirates do the same, but they didn't paid for it.

In the case a company goes out of business, there isn't much left to sue. They wouldn't even pay all their debts, nobody would sue them and see a penny. Despite that, you should check in their terms if you're even allowed to sue them in that case. They're selling a license, not a real product, so I guess not.

Must be a newer version as that works on my laptop too after I disconnect wifi. On my desktop it never gets past the login screen, never gives the option to start offline. It has been offline for over a year so I guess its missing the start offline update. I wonder if you can update steam through a usb stick. I guess if I duplicate the Steam directory onto my desktop it should work in theory. Nothing to lose, gonna try.

I guess that's also the way to let my kids play my Steam games on a seperate PC while I'm logged into Steam on my laptop.

Happened to me a few weeks ago. Virtually my entire library was unplayable. Multiple consoles is actually the reason I went digital but the way PlayStation handles it is kind of frustrating. Only the main console gets automatically backed up. I'll play on the secondary and go back to the first. None of my save data will be there. Worse yet, sometimes the old data will overwrite the new. Also, on my secondary console, nobody can play my games but me even if I'm signed in. It's crazy.

The biggest plus is not having to change discs, I guess. I wish they would go back to the PSP/PS3 multiple primary console option.

Don't know if this has been answered but this is false.

For most PS4 games I own physically, you can play it from the beginning almost instantly. Try to load a saved game from further in the game and you'll have to wait. Batman Arkham Knight asked me to wait like 3 hours until everything was installed. Try it yourself!