For now that's the way things are they could change once consoles fully embrace digital.

Yeah, but why kill retail then? What's the point of working towards 100% control over your platform if you then let the user "undermine" you like that?

You kill retail to save money overall and bring all game purchases to your environment giving you completely control over where users can purchase your games. The user wont be undermining consoles if the only way you can perform a backup of a game is by purchasing it first. Once you purchase it your account is granted a digital license for that game and the backup will only work if you have the digital license present.

Once you purchase it your account is granted a digital license for that game.

The name of this article is "New patch reportedly makes Silent Hill P.T Unplayable". New and official patch that makes your game unplayable. Nevermind the fact that's a demo. If the precedent is set they will allow this things to happen by just adding that condition to the agreeing license noone reads.

This is different because at that point you've purchased a product and now Sony has purposely made it unusable. At that point the console makers would be opening themselves up to lawsuits. They can do this with PT because it's free and was never sold by Sony for money.

Honestly if you want to get an idea of what digital only gaming looks like just look at Steam. It's great I've been using it for years no issues ever. Console makers will just follow their lead they wont do things like make games that people purchased unplayable on purpose because not only is there no reason to do that but it will also open them up to lawsuits.

I'm pretty sure they can just loophole their way out of that problem. If they really want to, they can just change the definition of "digital purchase" so that they can just say it's an overglorified rental and force you to buy it again after 5-10 years. And by that point, the game might not be on sale at all... Everyone wants entertainment in general to go the way of Netflix, after all, so buying games might not be as good as subscriptions for their games, at which point they can add or substract games as they please, who is going to stop them? You didn't buy the game, it's not yours.

And also, for most of games they wouldn't even need to be that crafty. Just imagine how many mp-only games are going to become obsolete on consoles once the servers are down, without the need of subterfuge.

Guys its been reported that this was just a Hoax and the demo works perfectly fine.

Like I said this has been the way PC gaming has been for years no issues.

Your under the impression that these companies can just put whatever they want in their agreements and there good to go. That's not how it works. If I write a contract that says your my slave for life and you sign it that doesn't make it legally binding. Sony,MS, and whoever else can write whatever they want in their agreement but at the end of the day consumer protection laws are what matters and the only thing the judge will care about. In the US some of this stuff might actually work because consumer protection laws are crap here. I haven't taken a deep look into them to verify it though. In places like Australia and Europe they do not mess around with this kind of stuff and would heavily fine these companies for trying to circumvent these laws. 

For instance if you preorder a game digitally in the US Sony doesn't have to give you a refund before the game releases (or ever). In Europe they are required to and no amount of agreements or fancy lawyer tricks will get them around that. They would have already done it if they could.

I remember when they patched out a feature on the PS3 (I think it was the ability to install linux) they got sued and it became a big problem, they then updated their terms in a following update stating that some features can be subject to change, still didn't help them though.

Wrong. With a disc, I could always put it into a console without an internet connection, and thus no patch to disable the game. While you might be able to avoid the patch with a digital copy, once it has been patched it's done and cannot be undone save for finding someone with an unpatched copy.

It is a DRM thing, but all games are nowadays. The difference here is being able to still run a disc as opposed to just being screwed.